parasubvert

The effects were not the same as climate change denial, and it's absurd to suggest Nordhaus wanted or even that his results would have let humanity die out.

The majority of damage is being done by climate denying citizens and their elected populist governments that are entirely dismantling climate policies and carbon taxation or alternative carbon pricing measures.

His research methods are the foundation of environmental economics, so he should not be ignored (and won't be, DICE remains one major lens used by governments). The disagreement is over the numbers and specific damage assumptions which have been revised by others in new DICE model variants.

This is entirely wrong. It is crucial to teach students the foundations of the academic discipline they're about to study, which is currently the neoclassical Keynesian synthesis.

Every economic model is fiction to some degree, what matters is the usefulness of the models to make policy decisions or predict outcomes. One can branch off into heterodox schools of thought like Austrian, Marxism, Chicago, or Behavioral... but students need to be grounded in the field's consensus to be able to know how to speak intelligibly across these areas if they're to have any effectiveness.

Nordhaus was not a climate denier by any stretch of the imagination. The man founded climate economics, and advocated for carbon taxes very early!

He is deserving of critique for being far too conservative in his approach, yes, but it's not like the biggest damagers of the environment are doing less because William Nordhaus told them to do less. Trump and populist right aren't ripping up the EPA, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc. because of Nordhaus. They ripped up the policies because they deny climate change entirely. Would adopting more aggressive measures in the 80s made things better? Possibly, but I think people over estimate the political will vs. the technological shifts needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

Only now is it obvious we are going to rapidly, exponentially, move to solar globally because the cost savings are undeniable, regardless of what deniers may want. And, contrary to your Berman link above, energy transitions are NOT a myth. They were not evenly distributed, but they were quietly, regionally happening (the UK, and California, for example). Now it's reached a tipping point, and going global.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/global-solar-capacity...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential...

Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally, endogenous technological change is an exemplary growth theory that (with Paul Romer) was deserving of the Nobel, and was an early proponent of carbon taxes and created many of the tools used in environmental economics.

I mean, he's absolutely deserving of critique, even harsh critique, but you're going to have try harder than "his analysis is awful" and he caused "immeasurable damage" when he co-created the movement.

Eh, the tobacco companies were found very liable ($206 billion in the US alone), Meta has to pay $18 billion for the child safety liability findings, Visa+MC $38 billion, Amazon $2.5 billion over Amazon Prime, Opiod companies had a $25 billion judgement recently...

Shareholder liability is not the only way, but it is A way. There are many unlimited liability companies out there that get high privacy as a tradeoff to liability. Limited liability corps encourages investment but requires public disclosure and enforcement. Society has to decide it if wants to clamp down on limited liability corps (or not). So far they've voted "or not".

Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.

Capital has plenty of desire to hold it accountable, to sustain the system. Capital is not a unified group of interests; many of them favor justice.

The people do have significant power at the ballot box, and chose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.

It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.

The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.

Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.

In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.

The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.

If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.

Humanity isn't doomed. Worse, it's going to survive, and have to deal with the messes we made.

This is a string of non-sequiturs that do not prove your conclusion.

According to haveibeenpwnd, my gmail address (which I too have had since invite-only) has been in 1 data breach. My Mac.com address which I've had since it was called iTools, 19 breaches. I've had to rotate my email account passwords I think 3 or 4 times over the last 20 years, and rotate most external accounts that use those email addresses a few times. I'm not sure what this proves other than "you should randomly generate your passwords & rotate them" which is what mainstream users have been doing for at least a few years now. Apple also notifies me if any password I use has been in a breach, and gives an easy link to rotate it.

SSN fraud predates the Internet and has little to do with online consumer services privacy (most don't have your SSN). When I was a young teenage cracker anarchist in the late 80s & early 90s, we got credit cards & SSN's through hacking the credit agencies, credit card companies, credit unions and regional banks (all of whom often had insecure dialup endpoints, or even better, insecure X.25 network endpoints), and through a BBS community that would disseminate these data breaches. Same as it ever was.

Mainstream end to end encrypted apps do not monitor your private messages. Cynicism is not wisdom. WhatsApp offering an on-app opt-in model to detect scans seems like a well thought through feature, though Meta's reputation is not good on this topic.

Clearly many do not care about privacy. But it is quite possible to be very online and have reasonable privacy. It requires discernment and discipline.

It strikes me that heavy AI agent users have an extraordinarily high risk tolerance for identity theft, privacy breaches and data loss vs. perceived productivity. Far beyond what any responsible medium to large size company would ever tolerate.

Overall the limits to AI productivity can be summarized in one word: discipline. If you're undisciplined in your security, your design constraints, your automated test coverage, your separation of the deterministic and indeterministic, you will be quite productive ... for a time. Until quite suddenly, you aren't, possibly due to catastrophe.

Similar to the early era of computers on the Internet, with lax security, we have a window where we can get away with this, but it will close quicker than many realize. Some things do seem to need to be learned the hard way.

Apple is trying to do the bare minimum here - not even introducing a new security model - and people are already freaking out. But a disciplined agent sandbox model is exactly what we need to get to.

Docker has an interesting approach lately with their sandboxes which are firewalled, proxied, and file system restricted microVMs (you can bind mount outside) with a docker daemon inside of it.

It is interesting you feel phones and OSes are stuck in the 70s when the real pioneering work of building a personal computer that wasn't designed for prefab apps but rather built for personal use in a fully programmable, reflective, extensible system was in the 70s with the Xerox Alto and Smalltalk.

The future is often rooted in the past that has been forgotten.

Many promising tech startups make these mistakes by thinking they're the first to come up with an idea, when really it was decades ago.

For entrepreneurs and explorers in this new AI age, rather than being kids again, which seems to be a way to quickly and repeatedly step on rakes, I might suggest being an old wizard. They retain playfulness and openness tempered by wisdom and experience and vast libraries of history. New things often rhyme with old things.

I have really enjoyed Arcs by Cole Wehrle as my modern Diplomacy-like asymmetrical war game - cutthroat, negotiating, area control, but also more randomness, variety and theme. And the campaign totally changes the vibe into a space opera!

Root was also very good but I think is harder to master as the factions are so different and so runaway games are common IMO.

They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.

Exactly this. Spotlight remains the best local search but it falls apart with disk space limits.

Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)

This is fiction. Apple co-developed USB-C, it's their tech, in particular the physical and electrical design in collaboration with Intel and HP (and Google and Microsoft on software drivers).

Changing connectors - after the 30 pin to lightning era - is a very annoying and wasteful thing where they and their customers wanted to wait as long as possible to do. On the other hand, Apple is legendary for pushing users to new ports far faster than the market is ready for them - original USB in 1997, and USB-C on laptops in 2015!

It was non-customers and competitors that pushed for USB-C. Th EU's mandate may have sped this up by a single annual iteration at best. Lightning cables are still ubiquitous to this day.

Yeah this narrative is effectively fiction as most of what you say is entirely untrue. They are very user-friendly, and it's why they have so many customers.

We can run old versions of macOS on ancient hardware just fine; Apple supports this up to about 7-8 years, anything after is possible through community support since Darwin is open.

They also support their mobile/embedded OSes longer than any other ecosystem.

They're

Tim Cook has famously told shareholders to sell the stock and buy another if they don't like that he doesn't maximize profits all the time.

Ironically, this essay is an example of at least somewhat "questionable taste". It has provoked dialogue and thus is valuable, but I think it makes a number of cognitive errors in its argument.

"Taste" is just knowledge. Advanced knowledge. Knowledge that is not easily put into words.

This is another restatement that knowledge, in a human head, is the determining factor of production, over land, labor and capital. This a post-capitalist argument that's been made for over 30 years (Peter Drucker in his 1993 book is my favorite), and it's been at least somewhat true even back to the 70s, just increasingly so as AI takes off.

The author's sidebar of AI or even cloud computing "taking ownership of the means of production away from workers" is entirely misunderstanding how the modern economy operates and shows how badly we need a new Marx (and Keynes, Schumpeter, or Drucker) since his analysis doesn't seem to provide the same analytical value in late capitalism. Renting vs. owning the means of production is now entirely a function of knowledge of the entrepreneurs (and their team).

Capital is ubiquitous now and is desperate for return - it remains powerful but is not all-powerful. We've had years of near-low interest rates and even after COVID inflation, they're still historically low. It is far more accessible to entrepreneurs than it has ever been in history, between grants, loans, subsidies, private equity, angels, crowdfunding, donations, etc. It's practically a cliche that billions in capital can be wasted on an initiative because the people involved had no idea what they were doing. I don't think AI changes that.

We don't need to rent our tokens, we can run open models on our local rigs (which still requires capital). We don't need to rent our servers, we can buy, rack and stack them on our own. Which we choose is fentirely dependent on the knowledge we have. If we don't know how to run an AI rig, we must rent it. If we don't know how to run a server, we must rent it. etc.

There are several walls driven by taste - Design - Testing - Production - Security - Scalability

In particular, the author seems confused on what "production" is. Production is still the wall. There was a joke on X the other day:

"I vibe coded my dream app! Try it out here: http://localhost:8080/coolapp"

Software running in production is not tokens. I'm sure properly prompted AI can deploy and run simple software in production but this requires a lot of knowledge to prompt to constrain it to run in a secure, scalable, adaptable way as complexity, scale, and capability grows.

That's interesting. I would (and I think most?) would say the opposite. Good taste is hard to define because it is very contextual. There's popular taste but also there's artisanal/specialized knowledge taste. One potentially leads to mass adoption, the other leads to higher value for a few people.

I don't know how you're paying that much.

Sandwich + Tenders + 2 Cole slaws + 2 bottled 500ml drink + one fries, as combos here in western Canada total up to $50 CAD for me on DoorDash...

Except this isn't like tulips or NFTs or Crypto; AI is actually useful (far beyond being a chatbot), and has real supply & demand, vs. a being pure speculative investment.

Yes, there's too much hype, and forcing the use of it does no one any good. And for sure a lot of that demand detached from results, and this means the demand will ebb. But I don't think this is like the dot-com bubble, it's more like the OPEC oil embargoing the 70s where soaring prices detached from results led to a collapse in demand that lasted a long while.

It's because the hardware can't really handle the latest and greatest games unless you get the top end hardware. Their GPU innovation is on letting you run an AAA game from 5 years ago on a tablet.

I wouldn't say 'eliminated gaming', they just have they've put a lot of encouragement into Mac gaming in recent years to the point that they're maintaining Rosetta 2 for game ports (via Crossover/Wine/Proton) even after its broader deprecation.

The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.

And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.

Yeah I don't doubt your lived experience with the product. And I too have run Linux for a long time (1995).

A vSphere cluster (in comparison to say KVM) has been easier to run in my perspective, but I do think it helps a lot to be a part of the VMware tech community to learn the best practices since there are historical quirks that are not always intuitive.

Thank you for your response on the external DNS, that makes sense in retrospect.