gooserock

Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind just turned 15 years old. There's still an active mod community for it.

> Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help

It's easy.

- Stop flying.

- Eat less meat.

- Buy less stuff.

- Use less energy.

Rising sea levels are a concern in the long-term, but what I'm most worried about in my lifetime is the collapse of the industrial food system due to rapid warming.

Basically if the Earth warms faster than plants and science can adapt, it's a real possibility that a very large chunk of the arable land that currently feeds eight billion people worldwide will become useless. The fear is that we won't be able to grow wheat or rice where we used to, due to heat and drought (Great Plains) or floods (Southeast Asia) or whatever else.

Sure, we could just start farming Siberia and Northern Canada, but it would take decades to establish all the infrastructure necessary to do that, and in the meantime we'd have to deal with truly massive famines, political destabilization, and the collapse of many states. Not to mention the fact that crop yields will inevitably be lower in arctic latitudes due to shorter growing seasons.

Our entire civilization is built on a global, industrial food network, and it's more precarious than you think. Most countries don't have reserves of food at all, and the ones that do only have scant reserves. If methane releases cause the Earth's climate to lurch warmer in a short enough period of time, a couple real good crop failures will cause the network to collapse, and our civilization (or at least a few entire regions) will collapse in short order.

The idea that building high-income housing makes rents rise is pretty obviously bunk, but the idea that building high-income housing "helps affordability" is not as clear cut. Is it good to increase supply? Yes, of course. But on the other hand, this article fails to mention three phenomena plaguing cities like London, San Francisco, and Vancouver:

1. Speculators. There's been a huge uptick in people from other locales - even internationally - buying or building housing units as investments and literally leaving them empty, expecting them to appreciate in value. These units are effectively not part of the housing stock and don't help with the supply problem.

2. Vacation Homes. As wealth inequality has become more dramatic, the wealthy have more income to spend on vacation homes. In cities like Portland, Maine, Manhattan and San Francisco, many high-end condo buyers are buying these units as vacation destinations that they'll only occupy for a tiny part of the year. These too are not being truly added to the housing supply.

3. Airbnb/Short Term Rentals. I don't want to single out Airbnb here, but it's known to real estate agents and investors that you can make way more money with an Airbnb rental than a long-term rental. (Where I live it's about 5x difference in annual income.) Many new housing units are being eaten by people who use them to operate short-term rentals, which they have an enormous economic incentive to do. These units too are not being added to the long-term housing supply.

> how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.

See: Uber

I'm shocked - shocked! - to find that gambling is going on here!

But why are we talking about this in terms of "mysteries"? We'll always be able to reduce things down to a level where we don't know how it works. Right now, sure, we don't know what makes matter matterial, but for the purposes of the consciousness conversation, is that relevant? Just because we don't understand why electrons are electrons, does that prevent us from understanding how electricity works? "Consciousness" is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure; just because we don't understand why the atomic components of that infrastructure doesn't mean that the emergent property has some "mysterious" aspect any more than anything else does.

Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what the hell this article is driving at. But I'm pretty confident in my personal understanding of "consciousness": it's a word that we use to describe our "experiencing" of the physical world, which is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure.

Is this article agreeing with me, or disagreeing with me? I can't honestly tell.

It's not that consciousness "isn't real" in the sense that flying unicorns aren't real - it's that "consciousness" is just a word that humans made to describe a phenomenon, just like "turbulence."

> If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me.

Because my matter and your matter aren't in close enough physical proximity or the appropriate configuration to have any communication with one another. Same way that you and I both live in houses, but my front door doesn't open into your living room.

> What does a website platform need $850 million more for?

Like others have commented, at least some of this money will be used to pay off initial investors with a nice profit. It's a kind of pyramid scheme, really, that ends with an IPO.

But this whole game is inherently one where some governments will lose. If countries are free to set their own corporate tax rates, you'll get some with high rates and some with lower, and corporations - which can relocate in a way that a state cannot - will just gravitate from the high end to the low end, screwing over those at the high end.

That is the problem: we live in a world where business can be global, but our states are regional. It's asymmetric warfare: because of the structure of the game, the corporations always have the upper hand.

Are you familiar with a country called the United States? I hear they've done pretty well with immigrants from vastly different cultural backgrounds, many of whom don't speak the language.

Also ponzi schemes.

But it's important to point out that

1) That $1.1 billion was for two facilities

2) LIGO underwent a huge upgrade over the last decade, making the instruments tremendously more sensitive, and the cost of this upgrade is included in there as well.

So I suspect that building a third facility with the sensitivity of the two existing facilities would be a much more affordable endeavor. The first time around is always the most expensive.

I think there might be state-based chapters? My friends here are actually part of "Code for Maine."

The funny thing was, in interview #2 I did mention that that they were asking me all the same questions, once it became clear that that was happening. The interviewer was like, "Oh? Really? Well this is our interview process," and then kept going. And these were 30-45 minute phone interviews, too. It was really strange.

Thanks for your thoughts, I think you have a decent point there.

My experience does include running front-end at the startup I worked at, and even being part of the three-person group that decided on the direction of the product (with the two founders). My communication skills are battle-tested from years of contracting (and a liberal arts university background), but I do lack experience dealing with huge bureaucracies and I lack experience with business development. So maybe that was it.

That said, if your theory is right that they were slotting me in as a GS-14, they could have communicated with me about that difficulty. I would have been totally fine with whatever role they wanted to give me - which I made clear in the "groundhog day" interviews - because I just wanted to help. :-D

I've actually started working with some Code for America folks here in my community - independently of CfA - on some city open data projects. They're awesome. :-)

My experience has all been with teams and companies < 15 people, and he seemed unhappy about that.

The startup I worked on had 12 people at its height (before it was bought by a large tech company), and I was the first employee hire so I was in a position of some leadership.

He kept asking me strange questions that presupposed I knew how to negotiate with large entities like government agencies... as a developer.

That interview - plus the other two "groundhog day" interviews - were the strangest interview process I've ever experienced.

For what it's worth, I applied to work with 18F late last year. I'm a web developer with a wide array of skills - front-end, back-end, and even UI/UX design, product design, and some marketing and management - with about 8 years of experience, mostly doing independent consulting with a couple years at a SF startup in there. I'm also very civic minded, doing a bunch of pro-bono work and (since) getting involved in community activism.

I had two phone interviews in which both interviewers asked almost the exact same questions (which struck me as odd). Then I had a third phone interview in which the interviewer - who had a law background, as I recall - seemed very disappointed that I had not worked on Google-sized teams before. Maybe he was having a bad day, but his tone made it sound like I was wasting his time. That was the last I heard from them.

Sorry, this probably isn't the right place to comment on this, but I just wanted to share my experience with you. I was somewhat disappointed in the process, even though I LOVE the mission of 18F. I was prepared to up and move to DC, and honestly take whatever salary you offered - I was in it for the mission, not the money.

...displaying a great example of why the free market is not the best way to handle healthcare and medical research. The availability of treatment has everything to do with profit, and little to do with need.

Presumably though, employees also got paid a very, very healthy salary while working there too, so it's far from a complete loss...

> and all the investors are chumps who believe whatever management puts in the big font at the top of the press release

Chumps, no. Humans, yes.

If you want to know more about the Norse accounts of America and how their presence in Newfoundland was originally discovered, I recommend listening to my podcast - the Born Yesterday podcast - about it. It's one of my best episodes, I think: http://bornyesterdaypodcast.com/#episode5

> Valley VCs Sit on Cash, Forcing Startups to Dial Back Bullshit

FTFY

The really scary thing about this isn't the arctic ice; it's the permafrost at high latitudes. The permafrost contains a whole heck of a lot of methane, and as it melts it releases that methane, which in turn causes the atmosphere to warm further.

We may look back on this moment as the start of a runaway greenhouse effect.

"First one's free."