The West’s Nuclear Mistake (The Atlantic)

Yes, that wasn’t the best article to use to illustrate my point. Apologies (I was in a hurry and grabbed the wrong link). The 2021-2022 change was from a much higher baseline than it would have been if Germany hadn’t abandoned nuclear power. This article actually addresses my point:

The West’s Nuclear Mistake (The Atlantic)

Germany in 2020 was ninth in the world in coal burning. The UK burned barely any coal. The difference was the disastrous decision by Germany to drop nuclear power.

But nuclear power is dangerous!

The proven death toll from Fukishima is in the single digits. Three Mile Island had zero. Chernobyl killed 60 people almost immediately and maybe several hundred overall, but let's assume 20,000 lives shortened, to accept the absolute worst-case estimates.

All of those deaths together represent fewer deaths than two years of Chinese coal mining. If you factor in the health impacts of coal soot, coal is hundreds of thousands of times more deadly. Full replacement of coal with nuclear might have saved 7 million lives.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/

Newer plants can be designed so meltdowns are impossible. High-level nuclear waste can be reprocessed. Being afraid of a modern nuclear power plant is like refusing to fly on a 787 because the Hindenburg crashed.

Yes, there are some outdated plants (or plants in earthquake zones), that probably should be shut down, but we should be building new plants as fast as possible.

France has proven that nuclear power can be safe, economical, and generate minimal high-level waste, but even their technology is out of date.

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Despite Germany’s PR, their pre-Ukraine emissions reductions have far more to do with demographic decline than alternative energy. German emissions reductions have actually slowed since they started their solar buildout.

Also, Germany counts electricity generation from lignite as “renewable” as long as it is backstopping solar. This vastly overstates their green capacity, as lots of energy is used in the evening.

https://youtu.be/AYu9rliT3F4

Why Germany is not as green as you think

German consumption of lignite (dirty coal) has increased sharply since nuclear was largely abandoned.

The price you quoted ignores the cost of backstopping solar at night or on cloudy days.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/germany-returns-to-coal-as-energy-security-trumps-climate-goals

Yeah, solar only really makes sense in really sunny areas.

Germany is learning that the hard way.

The US hasn’t learned it yet. I have seen solar arrays in western Oregon, central Michigan, and Connecticut.

What we really need are more efficient long-distance transmission lines and s smarter grid.

We could then put large solar arrays in the southwest and huge wind farms in the Great Plains and distribute the power where it’s needed.

What about cost?

I have heard that CSP is being abandoned because of the massive drop in cost of solar panels.

The energy storage angle is interesting, however.

What a miraculous time to be alive (and also a mouse)!

There were viable alternatives to CFCs, and relatively few companies produced and used them.

Almost everyone uses fossil fuels, and the alternatives are still problematic:

Solar and wind are intermittent and only work economically in certain areas (requiring transmission upgrades and storage capacity).

Nuclear is very expensive (outside of France) and slow to build out.

It’s much easier to regulate a few dozen companies than to tax carbon in hundreds of countries at different stages of development.

The 3d printing thing is already in use in a very limited way. The one I saw used concrete, layered gradually (even for internal walls).

This should remove the necessity for straight walls to save construction costs. In the hands of creative architects, we could see a major residential design revolution.

https://youtu.be/vL2KoMNzGTo

For sure. Forgot about quantum computers. May be necessary for true AI

In no particular order

• Fusion power
• General artificial intelligence
• Gene editing
• Nanotechnology

A self-balancing quadcopter is probably not any harder to fly than a car is to drive, but self-flying would be safer. I think the bigger problems would be:

1. Landing/takeoff space near city centers
2. Noise
3. Battery life
4. Adverse weather (icing, wind)
5. Bird strike

I hope I’m wrong, but flying to work will likely remain the province of the rich for the foreseeable future.

So ambidextrous people are twice as smart as everyone else? Interesting.

Eventually, you run up against the laws of physics, but we don’t fully know what those are yet, so I assume we have a lot of room to run.

It does seem like breakthroughs have slowed down recently, but I chalk this up to a lot of the low-hanging fruit being gone. I think we are laying the groundwork for some truly amazing advances, but they may take longer than we imagine.

The mind doesn’t do “impossible” things. We just have an incomplete grasp of how the brain works.

We would know by now if the brain had a capacity for psychic ability. There is no such thing, as all psychics that have been tested have been exposed as frauds.

There is no reason to suspect we are not already using our brains to their fullest potential.

We may be able to enhance our brains in the future through drugs, implanted chips, or gene editing.

What was stopping Benjamin Franklin from making rocket engines? He knew about wood stoves, so the technology was “in the works” in his day.

If there were going to be “tiny” VR headsets in two years, they would already be in testing or in use for high-end applications. I haven’t heard of any advancements that would suggest that radical miniaturization is imminent.

Maybe 20 years is too far out, but minimum 10 years based on where we are now (for VR. some AR headsets are already pretty small). I hope I’m wrong, btw.

BCI in 20 years? Maybe, but wires inside the skull will likely be required for anything beyond very basic interactions, which could limit adoption.

Lots of people still get sick from VR (survey from 2020):

• 13.7% frequently feel sick
• 19.1% sometimes feel sick
• 24.9% rarely
• 42.2% never

Bottom line is that around 20% of users get sick enough that they can’t really use VR. This is no big deal for gaming, but it could be a big problem for workplace or social applications.

Some companies don’t need VR to expand past gaming, but the money Meta has invested only makes sense if the market is mostly non-gamers. This is a tall order.

Microsoft’s Xbox was becoming competitive with the PlayStation, but when the Xbox One came out it was marketed as a set-top streaming/browsing device in addition to a game console.

Sony doubled down on gaming and focused on great exclusive titles and performance.

Microsoft (narrowly) regained the graphical performance title with the Xbox Series X, but by then, nobody cared.

The lesson for VR is to focus on gaming until the form factor makes sense for other applications.

I enjoy VR gaming, but shopping, working and socializing in VR doesn’t appeal to me.

Imagine if a workplace tried to mandate VR collaboration, and it made 20% of their employees dizzy or nauseated?

I’m sure there are are some killer AR/VR use cases out there, but until the hardware is as affordable, portable, and easy to use as smartphones, very few people will be interested.

My guess is that the technology required to make the metaverse mainstream is 20 years out, and even then it may never grow beyond niche applications.

Electricity isn’t used to create steel, glass and cement. In the 5 years after the 2008 financial crisis, China used more cement than the US has used in all of history.

Much of this construction was directed toward speculative properties that will never be lived in.

China doesn’t give a fuck.

I read somewhere that electricity only accounts for around 30% of all energy usage. I hope this is outdated or a misunderstanding on my part. Can’t seem to find confirmation.

Who has a pornhub account?

Also, if someone doesn’t look at porn on the internet that would seem weird.

> Europe could still retain gas in its energy mix to meet its necessities or solve the intermittency problems of renewables, especially during the winter months.

This is vastly underselling the situation. Northern European countries are not ideal for solar power.

The stated cost of solar power in the article ignores energy storage costs (currently no even feasible), and the cost of backstopping at night or on cloudy days.

There is a constant game of leap frog. There may be brief periods where missile defense systems have the upper hand, but there will never be permanent safety from incoming missiles. “Pretty advanced” isn’t good enough.

Maybe we should try to build a system that could reliably stop a small attack from North Korea or Iran, but trying to counter Russian or Chinese attacks would be ruinously expensive and could still be overcome by alternative delivery methods (shipping containers, etc.).

Problems facing missile defense systems:

• Easy and relatively cheap to accompany real warheads with decoys
• If we stopped 90% of Russian or Chinese warheads in a full-scale attack (currently we might get 5%) society is still effectively toast
• Hypersonic missiles are becoming smarter, more numerous and faster along with missile defense systems
• Missile defense capabilities are limited by treaty (I think)

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2022/physicists-argue-us-icbm-defenses-are-unreliable

>When one currency becomes too expensive, or its control too centralized, then we can just create a new currency and begin doing business in it instead.

This is a wild claim. Such a system would never scale to a global, or even national level. If a major currency was replaced without years of planning, the ensuing chaos would result in a global depression.

It's OK for crypto to be volatile, and for older tokens to be pushed aside, because it's early days, but much more stability will be required if a cryptocurrency is ever going to be used for anything but limited/illicit transactions.

>The rules are written in code (essentially pure logic)for everybody to see.

Ah yes. "Code is law". This cuts both ways. Say someone embedded a smart contract in a jpeg and gets it in your wallet somehow (social engineering often works on the average person). If you click on it, it drains your funds. Fuck you, code is law. Your tokens belong to the hacker now.

Also, if your currency is especially useful for money laundering, human trafficking, ransom and terrorism, that's not exactly benefitting society.

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>Its not really possible to be "hacked" though as you have an opportunity to read the code before accepting a contract.

Then why have so many hacks happened using this exact vector? I'm a software engineer and I miss things on code reviews sometimes (and this code isn't trying to hide things from me).

I imagine my mom would miss even more, if she even bothered to check the code. If only software experts can use a product safely, that doesn't bode well for mass adoption.

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>Ultimately its all about decentralization. The entire movement is a reaction to the percived corruption and unfairness in the current system.

Is Coinbase decentralized? How about Binance? Crypto is so hard for non-technical people to use that centralization will always be required.

Blockchains are orders of magnitude too slow for mainstream adoption as currencies (see article below). Therefore they require layers (Lightning, Layer2, etc.) to increase transaction throughput. These layers introduce centralization and negate many of the undeniable security benefits of the blockchain.

Replacing an unfair system with a system that is already far more unequal and can only be safely used by software engineers seems like trading one set of problems for another.

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-problem-the-race-for-visa-like-transaction-speed-5cce48f9d44

>The music industry is a good analog for what's happening in finance.

The music industry analogy breaks down pretty quickly. Music is a product, not a currency. It doesn't underpin the entire economy. The nature and use cases of music didn't change, just the distribution method and which entities had centralized control.

Centralized record companies were largely replaced by centralized streaming companies. There are still a couple dozen acts that hoover up 90% of the revenue. The one big benefit is that artists can build a following by touring and posting on YouTube and SoundCloud (and others) and avoid being enslaved by a record company early on.

SOURCES:
Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies: Burn It With Fire (Nicholas Weaver)
The best takedown of crypto by a Berkeley CS professor.

Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs
A less technical, but equally interesting takedown, focused mostly on NFTs

How Crypto Disappeared Into Thin Air

The Bitcoin Dream Is Dead

>Daos are not getting "hacked" exactly as that would require the underlying blockchain to be compromised.

Fair enough. The incident I am referring to was actually the result of an exchange being hacked. The hacker then leveraged his control of the majority of tokens to vote himself out of trouble in a DAO that was associated with the exchange. I can't find that one (heard about it on a podcast), but I have linked an example of a DAO being hacked via smart contract and another where price manipulation was used (almost legally, it would seem).

https://decrypt.co/112627/hacker-300k-olympus-dao

https://thedefiant.io/mango-caves-to-hacker

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>I'm a bit skeptical of the 90% number still, but with the number of institutional investors these days it makes sense. In fiat currency I suspect the number is worse.

It's obviously hard to compare exactly, but crypto is less equally distributed than fiat (at least when it comes to the largest currencies and tokens).

Countries aren't a perfect analog for currencies, but they can give you a rough idea of what I am talking about.

The Gini coefficient of the US is 0.49, and one of the most unequal countries is South Africa, at .63.

The Gini coefficient of Bitcoin is .88 and Ethereum is .92.

Sources:

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/10/gini-coefficients-of-cryptocurrencies.html

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI

>Its true blockchains don't communicate well with each other yet, but its possible to move value around between them.

Transfers between blockchains are choke points where security vulnerabilities and centralization can creep into the system (malicious smart contracts, etc). Even if these can be ironed out, you have to ask why so many people feel the need to create their own blockchain rather than leveraging the work of others.

It seems like part of the problem is that blockchains don't scale well. You usually have to build a layer on top of a blockchain to get decent transaction capacity, and these layers often introduce security holes and centralization.

The bigger problem seems to be the aforementioned inequality when it comes to tokens. If a token has already run up in value, it becomes prohibitively expensive for new entrants. Why wouldn't you want to own a huge chunk of a new token that might moon versus a fraction of an established coin that the whales already own?

These smaller/newer blockchains are more vulnerable to 50% attacks, which are not possible against the likes of Ethereum or Bitcoin.

The main problem with incentivizing new blockchain/token creation rather than building on a dominant chain is the lack of network effects. Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are popular because almost everyone you know or care about is on them. If there were 200 social media sites, and your friends and family were distributed across them at random, the user experience wouldn't be very compelling.

Some Web 3.0 proponents claim that blockchains are ideal for social media (metaverse or traditional). I can imagine some major advantages to a blockchain-based social media platform:

• No central ownership.
• Potential to reliably validate identity (if desired).
• Possibility for users to monetize their own data, rather than a company doing so
• Requiring buy-in (even a small amount), might make users feel more responsible and invested, and discourage bots and alt accounts.

I can also see some major downsides:

• No paid social-media platform aside from dating sites has ever succeeded at scale. Even a nominal fee might discourage the average user. A free site would presumably have to be funded by the same sketchy practices Web 3.0 is trying to avoid.
• It might be more difficult to remove content from an immutable blockchain (accidental nudes, drunken rants, hate speech, etc.)
• No existing blockchain can handle anywhere near the volume of traffic that a major social media site generates without an external layer (again, security and centralization risk).