Notices by Graydon (graydon@canada.masto.host)

@sbi @cstross Solar PV is solid-state quantum witchcraft; it's nigh-impossible for anything with moving parts to compete.

I think a lot of the "but nuclear?" is emotional difficulty with "nothing competes". (With a significant sideline in "but it's cool! and shiny!")

Magic glass and a battery bunker aren't cool and shiny, but they are distributed and incremental and make it easier to design for resilience.

@delong You're making simple things complex.

The great majority of voters have had their insecurity increased by the prices they pay for groceries. They do not observe the Biden administration either lowering the prices or punishing those responsible. Trump promises to hurt somebody, which facilitates feeling better about the grocery prices by restoring hierarchical norms.

A majority of male voters cannot imagine voting for a woman; this is not a thing a man can do and keep the name of a man.

@delong Being "white" means "an acknowledged member of the class with whom loot is shared"; stressed out people who can do so vote white supremacy because it does a magic that loot will be shared with them.

The loot ran out a century ago, everyone is better off in a world where there's no such thing as loot, and the modern corporation sees people as feedstock, not customers. But the stories have not caught up, so an awareness that one is unquestionably feedstock triggers white supremacy.

@delong Massive, 24/7/365 lying creates belief through repetition. This will always work; it's an extreme challenge to the American model of free speech because continuously connected media is a mind control ray that despite being slow, sloppy, and difficult to aim nonetheless works. (at least for the values of "works" employed by oligarchs.)

SARS-CoV-2 infection makes everyone less intellectually capable.

So far as is now known, this is mostly invisible to those experiencing it and it stacks; multiple x damage by n infections.

It seems likely this has broad political consequences.

@cstross @tokensane @tuban_muzuru Leaving aside hypothesized "electron tank" versions of room temperature superconductors, synthetic shippable fuels (ammonia, methanol, that Australian liquid battery approach, etc.) have two important functions. The one that doesn't get mentioned is arbitrage between "habitable" and "efficient", since the equator isn't going to be habitable and lots of places are going to get abruptly less habitable when the hurricane-driven floods mud up the solar panels, etc.

@cstross @tokensane @tuban_muzuru So we're going to have (should we pull this off) a bunch of layers; local solar PV, local storage, some amount of grid, some amount of shippable fuels, and lots of remote production of shippable fuels and energy-intensive goods like aluminium. The remote production gets pushed into mobile forms by sea-level rise; coastal infrastructure with an unpredictable lifetime mostly doesn't get built.

None of it matters a jot if the food problem doesn't get solved.

@OpenSexism Forty mortal years ago it was considered well-established that it starts at birth. People behave very differently towards a boy baby or a girl baby, and attempts to not tell people the gender of the baby sometimes result in violent responses.

@isaackuo Ukraine's adapting commercial hardware, like early Great War aircraft using rotary engines originally designed for motorcycles. A state-equivalent actor starting today and setting out to make an invader's costs unbearable isn't going to start there.

There's work going into "looks like a bird", "smallest practical flying robot", and so on. "How small and cheap can something be and have a 5% PK against human targets for a day?" isn't a quadcopter.

@dymaxion @wonka @dr2chase @cstross

@isaackuo @dymaxion @wonka @dr2chase @cstross The problem is incredibly hard. Rested, trained humans aren't good at it. (and in a conflict like Ukraine, with similar troops, uniforms, and equipment, it's even worse.)

The capability to do "artificial biting insect" is near-term, if it's not poorly-distributed-present.

I expect someone is going to go for what they can build. It's how we got chemical warfare in the Great War; it's at least a chunk of how we got napalm and cluster munitions.

@cstross People get way too excited about drones.

From 1860 to 1914, the decisive force is rifle regiments; you see things like the reconquest of Sudan where enemy forces are shot to pieces at ranges above 1000 m.

1915 and subsequent, the continuous front and concentration means anything seen gets ground up by artillery from beyond rifle range. It's a pure mass contest. (and "mechanised warfare" dilutes by making the continuous front move. 1939-1945 is an historical anomaly.)

@cstross What we're seeing with drones is the collapse of the loop between "see" and "hit"; the diffusion of fire which increases specific lethality (individual weapons are much closer to just enough); and the beginnings of the ability to do reconnaissance-by-fire in a literal way. ("seek until found", then kill it.)

Thing is, this is an asymmetric mass contest; Ukraine has cultural machinery Russia doesn't. If it's analogous to 1915, it doesn't reflect what 1918-equivalent will look like.

@cstross Nothing says you can't build or power a mobile jammer that puts out several MW; nothing says you can't build defensive drones, nothing says the sensor quality contest has even happened yet (can the attacker spot the target before the target spots the attacker and responds?), nothing says the trend to precision fire over volume of fire can't produce precise volume of fire. (the move to precision is economic.)

@dr2chase @cstross @isaackuo You can do image recognition with insect hardware.

It's why I don't expect we're going to see a "recognise faces" approach. Think "biting insect"; it's got several sorts of toxin and enough circuitry to go "is it warm?" and "does it have a heartbeat?" and some way to prefer stinging skin to armour.

Add in a few simple eusocial rules and some return-for-reload capacity if you can, but even as a one-way munition, the cost per corpse is likely much lower this way.

@Di4na @cstross Mammonites/Mammonism.

Functionally, they believe that money is the material love of god. And under no circumstances do you ever want god to love you less, so it turns out you're trying to obtain all the money.

It's needy and unstable and something beyond the usual imperial power structure failure of using access to military power to guarantee a commercial outcome.

@Remittancegirl It does clarify the terms of the election for the democratic candidate to be a woman of colour; is the United States going to be an autocracy who elects a President as CEO, or will it be a one person, one vote democracy with the rule of law and some notion of human rights?

Not much wiggle left there.

@Remittancegirl You know "the Cossacks work for the Czar"?

The media works for the money.

@silverwizard Appreciate the reassurance!

In 2020, I thought that respirator masks would be full-on Fashion by now.

@silverwizard N95s are a working surface of the whole and function by grace of a LOT of industrial design. I would avoid customizing one if I needed it to work.

Respirators, well, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NuYVJasqD08cqrROVwoL9COoYtCHrLRYXShg4MtTHe4/edit?gid=0#gid=0
has some material information and you could go from that to paint compatibility.

(My gut-level flinch response is that the fate that finds you for altering safety equipment will be strange to mercy. This is plausibly excessive and as specific consequence of my misspent youth.)

@kiennah @nemeciii @pkuipersmunneke The bill for the Carbon Binge either ends all history, or divides all history.

Nobody gets to keep what they have or to be certain there's anything to pass to their children nor to have any plausible expectation of cultural continuity. (If there are history books, they're going to despise us.)

What we're seeing in politics is some mix of anger, bargaining, and denial. And none of those ever work, and it's not to be expected they're going to help.