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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not as great as it seems. The thing is, everyone’s retirement is tied to real-estate. The numbers my vary country by country, but nearly all pension funds and mutual funds have significant exposure to real-estate that is just ignoring the issue that those properties may become uninsurable. That’s before what happens due to the economic disruption of all those cities slowly, then at an increased velocity, relocating.

    It’s not going to be pretty.



  • So yes, I realize this a joke map (honestly, a giant, probably mostly freshwater sea, in the US would be a blessing). But what you’re describing is the main issue with climate change.

    It’s not going to be “the day after tomorrow”. It will be coastal cities… which are… like nearly ALL of them… losing all their economic value. In the US when having this conversation I say “what do you do when any building in Manhattan is uninsurable? What do you do when it’s sure to have severe damage?”.

    For most people there are plenty of places to go, but the “going” is going to be very, very ugly.




  • CDPR is still on my “probably pass” list after cyber punk. I read the launch news, stayed faraway. I picked it up this year, after all the patches and work and… yeah it’s still fundamentally broken.

    Not in terms of balance or bugs, but it didn’t have the magic. To start, I really don’t like fantasy games. They’re just not my thing. Witcher 3 had bad combat mechanics, could be terribly grindy and YET is one of my top five games. The story telling, from the plot itself the tiny immersive details in the world, hooked you. They nailed the big things, but it was the little things like sometimes you’d free someone, and realize they murdered a bunch of dudes who were minding their own business, and none of this was mentioned in or affected any other plot line, it was just a random detail in the universe.

    Cyberpunk has a semblance of the big stuff, but exactly none of the soul. I cared about some of the main characters (emphasis on “some”) but exactly none about the world. It never felt like more than a backdrop.

    A loss and misstep is ok, particularly given a growing studio, the problem with CDPR is they think they fixed cyberpunk. With that mentality I’m giving their next game a huge berth.

    And if you liked cyberpunk, enjoy. There are parts to be enjoyed. There are some neat plot threads, some nifty side quests, if you enjoy it don’t let people ruin it for you.









  • how much you can build without a complete understanding

    We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

    My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

    Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

    So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

    And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?


  • That split entirely ruined the season for me. There’s way to much time between seasons, which I get, animation takes time, and they have some big names voice acting. But that split in addition with the long season time meant I could barley remember what was going on and then it was over.

    I don’t know, it’s a great show but I’ll probably catch it 5 years from now when it’s done. Just boneheaded producing decisions.



  • Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you’re near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to “ground water recharge”, which is just a fancy way of saying “we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer”.

    Increasingly, you’re seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

    So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn’t go “back” but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

    Wastewater is funny because it’s far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.