"""
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
"""
"""
The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28,
1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling
world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have
begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a
drastic decline in food production throughout the world.
"""
I’m going to have a hard time responding to this comment without breaking HN guidelines by being completely candid about how irresponsible, uninformed, and bad faith your comment seems to be.
But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community.
If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...
Nonsense. This debunking will be debunked in due time once the party line shifts and the narrative will need to be updated. I am old enough to have witnessed these wild gyrations in real time.
According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!
The CDC page he linked to defines "eliminated", as does his comment: "absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months". You can have outbreaks of a disease that have been eliminated from a population: the disease can be reintroduced from some other population. But what you don't have is person-to-person transmission within the population.
Say what? The global vaccine market was over 30 Billion dollars in 2018. This is the most lucrative pharma market because you are medicating the whole population including healthy people, no other medication can top that.
Not only that, but in the US the pharmaceuticals are shielded from liability for vaccines in stark contrast to any other medication type. How's that not a profit center?
The whole reason the liability shield program exists is concerns that if pharma companies were exposed to lawsuits from the inevitable vaccination reactions that happen or are purported to happen, they'd just drop out of a low-profit market.
Don't you see certain hypocrisy in this? Aren't we told that vaccines are safe?
The whole reason that the liability shield exists was a reaction to the DTP vaccine debacle. Which was eventually taken off the market in many countries including the US.
Nothing is perfectly safe. To be clear, I'm not in favor of anyone being held down at gunpoint and administered a vaccine. I'm fine with at least some organizations, including schools, requiring participants to have been vaccinated or have medical exemptions.That preserves the ability to opt out if you are so concerned about the risks but implies certain trade-offs.
You are confusing revenue and profit. Vaccine companies historically don’t make much profit, especially when compared to pharmaceutical companies who make and sell drug compounds.
Uh....you just responded to someone saying "most of the profits aren't from vaccinations" with the profit for an entire company that provides everything from cancer treatments to diabetes medications to also everything else.
They did call out Gardasil as a major cause of the increase in profits from the previous year, but it wasn't 6.2B by any stretch of the imagination.
Sebastian Funk, Associate Professor at the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: "to achieve [termination of measles transmission,] the population immune needs to be 93-95%, the herd immunity threshold." (https://www.who.int/immunization/sage/meetings/2017/october/...)
The article that I linked shows why even 100% vaccinated population will not achieve herd immunity. This is the meat of the article really, read it.
There is a substitution of terms in the first statement that you quoted. To stop transmission you need 90-95% of the population being _immune_ to the disease, not vaccinated against it. Do you see the difference?
The second quote by Funk got it right. But again please read the article why this is unattainable even with the 100% vaccination rate.
She is a trained immunologist, but besides, her article is well reasoned and provides references for every fact she cites. Compare that to the PBS article in the root comment.
Attaching a moniker "quack" at will is no way to have a discussion.
That article is not at all well-reasoned. There's a core of truth, which is that even with 100% vaccination a population may not always have effective herd immunity from measles, because the vaccine is not 100% effective over all timespans, and the threshold of immunity required for effective herd immunity against something as insanely infectious as measles is quite high.
But the author goes far beyond that conclusion and rails against the very idea of herd immunity, and claims that since herd immunity may not be possible in practice when dealing with measles, there should be no stigma against opting out of vaccination. These conclusions are very weakly argued, and the obvious counter-arguments are not addressed.
You can rifle a barrel in your garage. Search youtube, there are DIY videos.
Btw, you need a rifled barrel to make accurate shots at long-ish distances. For close quarter combat a submachine gun with a smooth bore would do quite well. Something similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borz. Any machine shop can crank those out in numbers.
I was a bit simplistic given that I didn't expect all the HN gun experts to come out of the woodwork on this one but I'll bite :)
Yes, you can get by with a smooth bore but "long-ish" here is significantly less than buckshot range. To get really nerdy, if volume of fire (submachine gun) is going to replace accuracy, the difficulty in creating a reliable magazine dwarfs the difficulty in rifling and while I haven't tried, I don't think 3D printing has the tolerances to solve that...yet.
Yes you can rifle a barrel in a garage but you need real machine tools as well as some very specialized tools that you'll need to either acquire or build which kind of adds steps beyond "have machine tools" -> "make gun"
To crudely rifle a barrel you just need a press. Or you can make a machine like this: https://www.alloutdoor.com/2017/04/17/watch-homemade-barrel-.... I once saw a video of a machine which did not require any machine tools, you'd just make a guide and then manually cut the riflings. All you need there is a lot of patience.
For these designs you also do not need 3d printing at all. You just need suitable pipes, or sheets of metal that you bend and either weld or use fasteners to make the receiver. You are right though, designing and building reliable magazines is probably going to be one of the things that require a lot of attention to details.
Depending on the magazine dimensions (single stack is hard) Reliable magazines can be largely 3d printed, as can the follower and the jigs used to bend piano wire into proper springs. The 3d.printed.mag will usually have less capacity than a metal one though.
Why? Doing anything of value requires expending of energy and producing heat, this is unavoidable. Saying that this activity is pointless just because you are not seeing any value does not mean that it is actually pointless. In general anything that people are willing to pay money for is not pointless for someone, otherwise that money would be spent on something else. It is like saying why a farmer needs to drive that big tractor down the field using precious (for whom?) oil and polluting the air whereas I can do things manually on my pea patch just fine. If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. And just to address 'waste' here, energy is not free so 'waste' that actually wastes resources cannot go on for long lest the waster goes bankrupt.
There are so many things I could argue with here but I'm tired so I'll just pick one.
> If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind.
Why would it mean that? If we were talking about households using more and more it might, but it might not. My tv uses far less energy than the one I had twenty years ago but there's no chance I'm going back to that heap of CRT junk. Likewise all my other appliances, my car etc. My life has improved as my energy usage has decreased. But even if the opposite were true, it's not households, but industry that in this case is consuming more and more power. An industry that produces no goods, provides no service, does no research, improves only the lives of the direct owners of that industry. It's as if they're building enormous, energy sucking diamond factories, but with the added chance that diamonds might be worthless by the time they have them.
Even if I'm wrong, even if higher energy usage means higher standard of living, that's a short term outlook, because over a hundred year period it will mean a much, much lower standard of living for everyone who hasn't drowned or starved yet
You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture.
And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change.
By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.
> By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level
Did you not just literally say that higher energy usage is itself a good thing?
Also on your point about production: My old tv had to be built, my old car also had to be built. It cost energy to replace them, but it does not equate to higher energy usage going forward.
I do agree with one thing you said though. We're swimming in unharnessed energy right now. If we can swap all the coal plants for fusion then maybe we can afford to waste energy on generating digital money, but right now bitcoin server farms mean more carbon in the atmosphere
If there are other falacious points then please give evidence for their inaccuracy, otherwise it appears like you just picked an easy point to refute, but claimed the entire argument was false.
No. I've got nothing to prove to you, stranger. Arguing with people on the internet is almost as big a waste of energy as bitcoin mining. If you think I'm wrong I'm not going to convince you or that guy otherwise.
That's not a very good analogy. The way to measure waste is by seeing if you can deliver the same customer value using fewer resources.
If I'm generous with the definition of "value", Bitcoin's main demonstrated value is as a speculative instrument. That is, something people gamble on. There are plenty of things for people to gamble on that consume less energy. Or none at all. For example, they could be gambling on the weather (as the degree-day markets do). There are other practical reasons -- much less common ones --people use Bitcoin, but those too can be done more efficiently.
Doing anything of value does require expending energy. But expending energy is no proof that anything of value is happening.
For a while, credit card processors in the US were pressured by the government not to authorize charges, even if Wikileaks would accept them as payment. That make it effectively impossible for Americans to donate that way.
Even if that’s different now (which I’m not sure it is), there will always be the next important cause.
This is a great point thanks for making it. imho it could be worded better, but it subtaintially invalidates the arguments like "bitcoin can only be used to waste energy and buy buy drugs"
There's no actual user value involved. "Avoids USD" is almost a religious statement. If one is concerned about volatility, then Bitcoin is a bad choice; it's more volatile than any major currency and most commodities. If one is concerned about the US government's future behavior, there are other major currencies. (And really, a currency is a bad place to park your wealth.) For any legitimate financial aim, there's a better solution than Bitcoin.
Yeah, if you don't count speculation as value (and I'm happy not to), then I think light financial crime is the next biggest use case. Which is interesting in that a lot of money laundering is illegal because although it may be valuable to the launderer, the cash transfered often comes from something where systemic value is dropping. E.g. ransomware only makes the world worse, even if it makes the ransomer a profit.
Doing anything of value requires expending of energy, but the way cryptocurrency is right now seems to encourage... inefficiencies.
That farmer driving the tractor down the field using energy in the form of oil is typically massively more productive than the manual pea patch laborer or even the era where "working animals" were helping with a lot of the farm work. Sure, the tractor using energy, but the tractor farmer is overall way more efficient.
It would be interesting to see how crypto's cost per unit compares with a relatively energy inefficient way of monetizing, paper currency and coins. Due to the various costs involved in manufacturing and distributing a coin or bill, I really can't say whether it's more efficient or less (and Google's not helping me here). What I think is fairly obvious is that most electronic cash systems do not have this initial upfront massive energy requirement crypto has, so best guess is from a resource perspective crypto is quite a bit less efficient than most electronic cash systems.
How would you value mining? What's the figure you'd assign to it? As the activity it is certainly valuable to ensure the validity of the blockchain. In my mind that's the function of the market to assign value. Of course with the technology being so new we can expect fluctuations, but I think eventually it'll settle down to some stable level that is acceptable to all market participants.
"As the activity it is certainly valuable to ensure the validity of the blockchain."
Not at the cost that it currently takes. Personally, I ascribe far, far, far less value (if any) to any cryptocurrency mining compared to using the energy for other stuff, or not using it (and not having the mark up on graphics cards).
"but I think eventually it'll settle down to some stable level that is acceptable to all market participants."
The "market participants" would only be those mining crypto, though.
Ah, but "personally" is the operative word here, other people obviously disagree.
> The "market participants" would only be those mining crypto, though.
Not only them. All people who would use bitcoin in some capacity and benefit from it, they all would be participants in that market. Miners could not exists without them, in the end of the day they get their pay from packing transactions into blocks, no transactions - no pay.
Except this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. Them deciding to waste a whole bunch of energy on something like cryptocurrency has very real effects on everyone else.
Ah, but you see their right to do what they want with what they own is holy you see. Can't touch that. That would be blasphemy, which is punishable with spending more of your tax dollars lobbying for stronger property rights and the state machinery to back it up.
> Based on what? And if people aren't getting value from using the blockchain, why are they using it?
It creates value for individuals at a bigger cost to society - a classic negative externality. Making drug dealing easier is immensely profitable and that's where all blockchain profits eventually come from - everything else is a smokescreen of intermediaries to create just enough deniability to let respectable business participate in the drug trade. It's just like outsourcing manufacturing to countries with lower environmental standards to profit from pollution (another example of something that's negative-value overall, but positive-value for the individual engaging in it).
Suppressing the drug trade is evidently something that society puts a high value on, given how much society spends on it.
> Do you have a source for this, or is this just what you believe?
Just looking at the whole blockchain ecosystem as a black box: any profit has to eventually come from outside, the rest is just moving that around. Speculators can move value around but aren't creating it. So who are the people getting something actually valuable in the real world from blockchain? I mean sure there's a bit of money laundering and evading capital controls, but the big one is drug dealing.
"Based on what? And if people aren't getting value from using the blockchain, why are they using it?"
You're assuming rationality. You're also assuming they're actually paying for the electricity. And you're forgetting that they're not paying for the negative externalities of their energy waste.
"Can you put a number on that, and justify it?"
Take the smallest number you can think of. Now, take a number smaller than that.
Then explain why the people using bitcoin are being irrational. Are the miners processing transactions and receiving fees in return being irrational? Are the people using bitcoin to send and receive funds being irrational? Please enlighten us (and them, apparently).
> You're also assuming they're actually paying for the electricity.
They are.
> And you're forgetting that they're not paying for the negative externalities of their energy waste.
Classic case of moving the goalposts. The same applies to any economic activity requiring the use of electricity.
> Take the smallest number you can think of. Now, take a number smaller than that.
> I trust rare numbers more than I trust the United States government
That's such a silly statement. Rare numbers do not control the value of bitcoin, the market does. Your rare number might be worth half what it was in December 2017, and twice what it was a year before that. Tomorrow it might be worth nothing. Or $1000. Or $1. The rareness of the number is about as relevant as the colour of the dollar
I don't. Do you really want to rely on a currency whose value fluctuates as wildly as Bitcoin's? I like knowing that the $X deposited in my bank account a few days ago will have approximately the same value in a few months or years.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here. I know what you are saying and in general it's hard to argue against it. However, I've personally seen an improvement in my well being at the same time as I've reduced what most people would consider my "standard of living".
I used to have a 3000 sq ft house, a car, a job I spent 3 hours a day commuting to in my car, every labour saving gadget you can think of, climate controlled everything, etc. I even drove to the laundromat frequently to pay someone to do my laundry because I was too busy to do it myself.
Now, I live in a small apartment in the country side, generally only minimally heat and do not cool my apartment (temp ranges from 5C to 35C during the year), I work from home, do not drive, eat seasonal, local food, preserve my own food, etc. Admittedly I got married and my wife does the laundry :-P. The improvement in my life is like night and day.
Like I say, I'm playing devil's advocate and I don't really imagine that everybody would be happy with my lifestyle. However, I really do think that the assumption that more insulation from the reality of nature is not necessarily a "higher standard of living". For me, especially, it's quite the opposite -- which would have been very surprising to the younger version of myself.
Even economically, the modern world is moving inexorably towards a place where "labour" refers to mental labour, not physical labour. For people who frequent HN, I think it's kind of assumed that this all right and proper. However, when I was teaching English in the rural high school in Japan where I now live, most of my students wanted to be fishermen or farmers. But they know that this is the way to eternal poverty. You can't realistically make a living doing that kind of thing. They end up working unhappily in a factory.
As we've fuelled the increased standard of living by reducing prices for necessities, we've created a world where everything needs to be a massive enterprise with high volumes and super low margins. Even the other day I was joking with my wife that I will quit my current job as a programmer and open a shop making artisanal cheese. "How many cheeses do you think you'll have to make in a year?", she asked. "Only about 20,000 I think" was my reply. Again, in my rural Japanese town, only 20 years ago you would have found a tofu maker, a miso maker, a sake brewery, 4 or 5 fruit and veg stores all drawing from the produce of the local area. And while the JA (national food distributor) is great about prioritising local food distribution, gone are the days where you can set up a shop or produce a product for just your local area.
It's the ubiquitous cheap energy that enables this increase in scale. It expands deliverability (I can mail order low temp pasturised milk from 3 prefectures over and have it delivered in a refrigerated truck o_O). It allows super efficient, mega scale operations from far away to under cut local, high labour intensive operations and reduces prices. In may ways it's amazing.
But, I'm not sure "increased standard of living" is actually the best term for it.
Commuting is pure misery, especially driving, and people tend to underestimate the effect of that. Avoiding a 3 hours/day commute is more than enough to explain why you'd be much happier/healthier/... even if everything else in your life had gone downhill. (A happy marriage is also a well-known source of happiness/contentment/etc.). I don't think the change in your wellbeing has anything to do with local cheeses or lack of temperature control or anything like that; if you'd switched to working from home and married but stayed in your climate-controlled big house you'd see the same improvement, maybe even a bigger one.
Yeah. It's possible to use energy badly, so human value is something more subtle and detailed than energy usage. I do think it works as a crude proxy though.
You are contradicting yourself. More interaction leads to more noise and now you are advising people to put headphones on or leave the place entirely. How are you supposed to culturally gel and socialize under such conditions?
I'm not sure what you're referring to -- Amazon policy? -- but the usual critical-point is 30 hours, for full-vs-part-time legislation and stuff like the ACA.
Saying that the mechanisms are known is a major case of hubris. For example, it is still not known exactly how aluminum salts, used as adjuvants in vaccines, work. Many vaccines were developed empirically, and researchers struggle to replicate the success for other diseases. If the mechanisms, as you say, were fully known, we would already have conquered cancer.
Here is an interesting example. In the 60s a vaccine against chlamydia was developed and then tested in one of "developing" countries. Vaccinated people showed high titers of antibodies in their blood (this is, by the way, how efficacy of vaccines is judged, not by the actual clinical studies, read the inserts, you'd be surprised). Despite the high titers vaccinated people were much more likely to get the disease and the course of the disease was more severe. The vaccine was pulled, and the reason for the failure was not known at the time.
If you follow the links in that article you will see how the process of how the body deals with a vaccine is not necessarily the same as the process of dealing with the disease directly.
Human immune system is complicated and is not fully understood. Infant immune system differs from the one of the adults, which further complicates the matters. Saying that the science there is settled is just not true.
""" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
""" The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...