Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Via email from Michael Bravo:

For another Kazakhstan-related quip, I find it illuminating that
there were so much interest on possible bitcoin influences, but zero
mention of the fact that Kazakhstan has 40% of world uranium mining,
and EU seems to be on the cusp of rebranding nuclear energy "green"
again (see
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/03/fury-eu-moves-ahead-plans-label-
gas-nuclear-green)

On the Metaverse, Patrick's #190 is excellent, I wholeheartedly
concur. I would say I see more "metaverse" potential in MMOGs than
in any of the corporate-powered hype trains. The latter are, first
and foremost, utterly devoid of meaning. My clan in Destiny 2, or my
15+ years involvement in the deliciously intricate world of EvE
Online, or my escapades as a Fuel Rat in Elite Dangerous contain
immeasurably more effort, meaning, friendships, skills and
ultimately joy based on my relationships with people who play, than
anything facebook/meta/alphabet ever contemplated.

I always considered the whole approach that there are some separate
"virtual" world(s) as nonsensical. Holistical angle seems much more
natural to me - we've got this one reality substrate we operate on.
It's absolutely arbitrary how we spend the cycles. Some people
oscillate between 9-to-5 and beer and family. Some build amazing
feats of engineering despite the world laughing and cursing at them.
Some collect matchboxes. Some sail the seas. Some spend time plugged
into the techno-gig du jour wielding the sword of the Thousand
Truths with their friends across the globe. But it's all the same
real world, there's nothing "virtual" about it. It's just another go
at "us vs them".
  

    
George Mokray, I appreciate your comments. I don’t think anyone who
knows me well would call me an irrationally optimistic person.
However, living in the middle of several epic social, economic and
political upheavals as we all are, how do we get perspective on
whether democracies are on an inexorable decline or progressive
transformation, say? Most of the world’s wealth is permanently in
the hands of 1% of 1%  – it looked that way during the Gilded Age,
too, in the U.S. Conspiracy thinking and disinformation are going to
definitively edge out objective facts or investigative journalism
for the long haul?

Broadly defined, news media - both in the info they provide and the
means by which they provide it – have been emerging and evolving
since Gutenberg figured out how to mass produce books nearly seven
centuries ago. That’s a third of the span of time we term the
“common era.” Kinda hard to write that off as an weird and
transitory accident of civilization.

Within a few centuries of that, general elections started to appear
– limited and corrupt and sporadic, but also a leap in expectations
about who governs who after centuries of submission to divine or
religious rule.

Let’s get a lot more focused. Looking at the U.S.: When I was
switching from content strategy and web production to being an
environmental journalist around 17 years ago, Exxon was the richest
company in the history of money, and spreading climate
disinformation with abandon. Coal-fired power produced more than 50%
of America’s electricity. The common wisdom there was it wouldn’t
substantially decrease for decades.

Solar energy cost around $3 per watt to install (down from nearly $7
in the mid-1980s), and the general wisdom was it wouldn’t become as
affordable as coal or methane gas before the 2030s or later.

Today: Exxon isn’t even in the top 10 most valuable U.S. firms. It’s
disinformation efforts have been so throughly exposed that it at
least feels the need to talk the low carbon spiel, and attorneys
general are bringing a potent array of consumer fraud lawsuits. Coal
hovers at about 20% of the power supply and generally dropping.
Solar is below a dollar a watt.

Hell, between that and the renewable energy tax credits, my own
45-unit co-op here in Brooklyn has gone solar. Between the city’s
climate action law and the state’s, we’re also in the process of
retiring our gas cooking lines in favor of electric. We’re
definitely ahead of the curve for our size, but maybe also a
harbinger. Most of the shareholders here are mainstream liberals and
only agree to this stuff when it’s clearly going to be cost
effective now and improve resale value later. 

The climate crisis is also advancing way faster than we thought it
would 15-20 years ago, of course, and both the U.S. and most other
major polluters still moving way too fitfully and slowly. The sixth
great extinction isn’t something we can slow or reverse with
technology, a la carbon drawdown’s potential (let’s hope Kim Stanley
Robinbson’s scenario that dumping a planet’s worth of salt into the
Atlantic current to keep it moving has legs). That is the bleakest
situation of all.

All I’m saying is that in many ways, the “common wisdom” privileging
the negative indicators over the positive 15-20 years ago got a lot
of things wrong.
  

    
Thanks, Emily. When all are busy protesting the darkness, it's hard
to see the light. But there is always good news as well as bad; the
psychology of infotainment privileges the bad over the good,
inherently.
  

    
Via email from Gyrgir:

I enjoyed very much Moxie Marlinspike's web3 critique: it's fair and
balanced, but ultimately brutal. I also read Vitalik's answer,
posted by <bslesins> in #176, but I have a different take on it.

Vitalik mirrors a sentiment that I often see in the tech contingent
of crypto/web3, as expressed here also by Vinay: "Yes, all these bad
things are true, but this is not what we intended.". That, and "give
it time".

But Vinay, we are not living in 1976: this is 2022 and it's all
about unintended consequences now. And we do not have time.

Anyone who claims that blockchain-as-in-practice-today is just a
basic technological brick ignores the total sum of our collective
experience from 2000 onwards.

It's like saying social networks, or even graph theory for that
matter, are a technology with both good and bad aspects, but then
again: Facebook.

I might sound rant-y but I'm an optimist at heart, and I won't throw
the baby out with the bathwater. So I'm asking: what about these
(and other) unintended consequences? What can we do about them?
Today*, not tomorrow. With blockchain or not, according to your
tastes.

For example, as Bruce wrote in #7, in our chronically diseased world
there are some things you just can't do anymore. Maybe coordinated
action at an inter-national level is one of them.

Are DAOs any kind of reasonable answer to that, today? What about in
some historical tomorrow (as opposed to a mythical/fantastical
tomorrow)?

* The 'today' restriction automatically disqualifies Vijay's carbon
accounting of #179. Not when this magnificent future comes into
being; today.
  

    
Via email from Michael Bravo:

Something that <bruces> casually says in <195> bugs me. The reigning
wiseguy of Russia never was a "dynamic fireball of a guy" (unless
you would enjoy seeing heavy Godwin's law applications to be labeled
as "dynamic fireballs"). He is a career KGB officer, serving in East
Germany for the peak of that career (think Stasi liaisons). He
almost ended up as a minor municipal grifter at the end of USSR, but
was wily enough to build organized crime connections that have
propelled him to where he is now, a professional top klept player.
People he trained in a judo club with, played ice hockey with, who
cooked for him or played music for him, [and survived] have all been
integrated into the klept structure to help protect the money and
the machine that extracts it from the country. Notable difference
from Corleone is that there are no horse heads these days, instead
you get a team of faceless FSB spooks slathering nerve agent on your
underwear.

So a dynamic sleazeball - maybe, and that's already a stretch.
  

    <scribbled by bslesins Sun 9 Jan 22 08:55>
  

    
During the pandemic I've gotten used to looking at charts and the
solar ones look a lot more cheerful than the pandemic ones.

It is discouraging when large forests in the Western US go up in
smoke though. One estimate has emissions from wildfires in the
Western US last summer at 130 million tons [1].

To put that in perspective, that seems to be about twice Bitcoin.

[1]
<https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/californias-wildfires-hig
h-carbon-dioxide-emissions-7537351/>
  

    
Gyrgir:

https://twitter.com/avalancheavax/status/1456334992687128577?lang=en-GB

Avalanche is 20? 30? 100? times faster than Ethereum, Ethereum
compatible, and emits less than 500 tons of carbon a year - and is
offset.

I sorted out their carbon credits buy last year for COP26, as well
as encouraging them to go Net Zero in the first place.

It's already here. Ethereum will take a bit longer to reach Net
Zero, but they'll get there.

Bitcoin is A Problem. It would cost about a billion dollars a year
to get Bitcoin to Net Zero. Maybe half that if they can prove how
much solar/hydro/wind they are using, which is going to be tricky.
Moving those people to Net Zero is going to take either a miracle or
acts of law: they've defined that electricity burn as core to their
security model, so they would have to unpick a decade of propaganda
to move to a "proof of stake" bitcoin fork.
  

    
On the topic of patience versus urgency, I tend to want to push back
against urgency as a default mode of communication, as is so often
the case in social media, at least the stuff widely shared. I feel
like if you're going to urge people along then you ought to have
some specific thing you want them to do. Maybe people will buy your
sales pitch and maybe they won't, but the call to action should at
least be legible.

Too often we seem to be urging others to hate on the designated
enemy or be very depressed about the world. As observers hanging out
in an Internet forum, I don't think we urgently need to do that.
They are not really actions so it doesn't matter if we do them or
not.

A small, local kind of urgency that I can get behind is getting
people to read an article or watch a video that you think is really
great. Or read a book?
  

    
Bitcoin is unnecessary.

Many of us have heard the chestnut "APIs are forever". Protocols are
even more persistent. There's no incentive built into the Bitcoin
protocol to encourage green mining, other than the cost of
electricity. This suggests to me that mining will never move very
far toward Net Zero.
  

    
Encouraging people to learn about Avalanche is a thing you could do.
There are many cryptocurrencies, though, and researching them tends
to be unpleasant reading. (Or worse, watching videos of talking
heads.) It's an uphill battle. An in-depth blog post of the sort
Marlinspike wrote, by someone who knows something and isn't afraid
to kick the tires, would probably be helpful for any new
cryptocurrency.

I'm reminded of Jepsen tests. A computer researcher started blogging
about testing the claims made by vendors of distributed databases
and finding how they break. This eventually became a sort of
quasi-standard where upcoming authors of new distributed databases
would want to have him run his tests and write an evaluation, to
show they are serious.

(In this way I am rooting for team curiosity without, you know,
actually being curious enough to volunteer.)
  

    
Brian,
I (at least this year) teach in a Mass Communication department,
where we teach about advertising giants like David ogilvy and the
like, and I agree totally on the urgency take. Unless I'm
misintepreting, there need to be media people who are able to do
better than to throw flotillas of statistics and say "WE GOTTA DO
SOMETHING!"  There needs to be somewhere that is able to cut through
the Fake and say clearly, calmly in a way that has real
consequences, "Look we don't have all the answers yet, but here are
some beginnings."  Part of steering the Queen Mary is taking resolve
for someone to start steering. 

Individuals are probably not going to enact this sort of change. 
It's going to take platforms, nation states, whatever to get things
moving. And some of it won't be fair or profitable. The question is
systemic; eventually there's probably going to be a class revolt,
world war, or systemic collapse. I wish I could say 50-100 years,
but if Trump gets re-elected, I wager 5-10.

But the way the system is gerrymandered globally, someone has to
blink, and IMO, web3 or the Blockchain isn't going to solve it.  The
digital network as a whole, and even if humanity goes wholly
electric, none of this is sustainable.

What to do? Honestly consider radical models of sustainability, zero
waste (as Eath is a closed homeostatic system), and get serious
about consumptive attenuation models before Malthus rises from the
grave.

Energy-wise, Nuclear's re-emergence is scary. Green Hydrogen and
gravity batteries seem really interesting.  But Mars colonization
isn't happening, and capitalism;s eternal growth model is't
sustainable. 
'
But to get here, I agree that urgency probably won't work either.
Clear, modest goals over short increments, and thinking of how to
have a gentle necropolitics.

Next episode: The Metaverse, or why automation will cause BMI then a
new labor market in cyberspace. Homework: "Hyper-Reality" (Video by
Keiichi Matsuda)
  

    
And, by the way, After the Metaverse post, I'll try to think of
something positive.
  

    
A data point about the news business: in 2000, the last year I was
at the SF Chronicle (managing sfgate.com), the paper grossed 139
million dollars in classified revenue. Now they don't even have a
serious classified section.
  

    
>Too often we seem to be urging others to hate on the designated
enemy or be very depressed about the world.

Performative defeatism. It's viral among the butthurt left.
  

    
Patrick,

I did some futuring around what real sustainability might look like
in America about 15 years ago.
https://www.shareable.net/the-unplugged/

=== quote begins ===
So we Unpluggers found a new way to unplug: an independent
life-support infrastructure and financial architecture – a society
within society – which allowed anybody who wanted to "buy out" to
"buy out at the bottom" rather than "buying out at the top."

If you are willing to live as an Unplugger does, your cost to buy
out is only around three months of wages for a factory worker, the
price of a used car. You never need to "work" again–that is, for
money which you spend to meet your basic needs.
=== quote ends ===

I think we're getting pretty close to the point where that might
start kicking in. The Tiny House movement is a stab at it, and the
issues around banning tiny houses and the general tensions around
property values and so on.

If you legalized tiny houses as long as they were off-grid solar and
super insulated - a green building code for tiny houses in fact - I
think tens of millions of Americans would slash their ecological
footprint by moving into one. Certainly so many young people.

Then inside your tiny house you can go flying in a hang glider over
Zurich for 15 cents of electricity to run your VR goggles.
  

    
On nuclear: the big problems with nuclear are fourfold.

1) it's super expensive
2) it can be used to make weapons
3) old reactors are super hard to maintain and decommission - they
get dangerous and sometimes explode
4) what to do with the waste

I have a *super not good* solution for this.

https://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/mapping-u-s-foreign-military-bases

Have the US military build nuclear reactors on all of its bases
around the world, and plug them into the national grid of their host
countries to provide power. US DoD now has a gigantic big ticket
item they can transfer over all their dumb pork war projects over
to. Pork for centuries. No problem getting it through congress.

And take 100% responsibility for maintaining and operating the
reactors: they are simply a part of normal base operations. Build
reactors everywhere. Charge some low low price for the power (it's
subsidised by pork) and cement the dependency of many poor nations
on US assistance.

Great plan, right? 

Green nuclear imperialism could save the planet. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY
GO WRONG?

I think this is possibly the worst idea I ever had, but it sure has
some fantastic chrome on it.
  

    
And think of what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or whatever its current
name is) could do with the military budget behind it!
  

    
I've been skeptical of nuclear energy for a long time for reasons
like the ones <hexayurt> listed. Some reading I did last month
suggested to me that I might have been too hasty in deciding that I
knew enough to draw worthwhile conclusions.

1970-generation nuclear generating stations are very expensive
because they use the light water moderated design that Adm. Hyman
Rickover chose to power nuclear submarines, in about 1949. He made
the right choice for powering submarines, and that design has worked
very well for the Navy. Scaled up by a factor of 500 for power
generating stations, the design needs elaborate and redundant
operating infrastructure to keep it safe. We don't have to stay
stuck with that design. That it's difficult and expensive to
decommission that generation of reactors is largely because the
design requires such large structures.

Jimmy Carter halted movement toward reprocessing of spent fuel over
concern that it would result in a plutonium economy and
proliferation of weapons. This was based on a politically alarming
but technically inaccurate premise, that plutonium from power
reactors could be used to make bombs. The isotopic mix in plutonium
from power reactors is not suitable for making bombs.

I think I'm moving, to quote the immortal Rocket J. Squirrel, toward
saying "This time, for sure!" in thinking that nuclear engineers
will pull a rabbit out of a hat soon. The industry has been
promising sweet technologies, coming real soon, that would make
nuclear energy cheap and safe. This time they may be right.

The key technology is reactors that run on fuel dissolved in molten
salt, with a thorium-based fast neutron fuel cycle that burns up
most of what would be useless waste in a light water reactor and
that doesn't produce fissionable residue. These reactors are much
closer to being fail safe than are light water reactors and don't
need elaborate support systems to achieve that safety. With
reprocessing, the amount of long-half-life waste would be reduced by
more than 95%, which would mean that the already-developed
repositories would handle a much larger fraction of the storage
requirement.
  

    
Nuclear's *hard*
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180823113558.htm
pebble bed reactors were going to save us, then not so much.

Does not predict future performance, of course.
  

    
James Lovelock, of the Gaia hypothesis, has been in favor of nuclear
energy sources:
<http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only-green-solution/>

"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by
Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These
fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has
proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting
over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or
radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly
because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen,
oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger,
which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than
20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer."

I'm offering this as JADP; I don't know enough about nuclear energy
to say whether he's got a point. 
  

    
He has a point, but he's picked the wrong risk: Chernobyl and
Fukushima are not the problem.

North Korea and Pakistan are the problem.
  

    
I don't know anything about this guy but this seems to be a good
introduction to Kazakhstan's significance for the Russians,
particularly for those (like me) who were thinking of it as "one of
those former Soviet republics."

<https://twitter.com/ClintEhrlich/status/1479517789450911747>
  

    
all seems very reasonable.
  

    
hmm, just did a search on clint ehrlich which made him sound very
pro russia


https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/the-report-was-actually-ca
lled-shower-of-falsehoods


but i didnt read that twitter stream as being that way.it just
explained why russia would be so tweaked about what's going on in
kazakhstan.