thirstywhimbrel

I agree that distinctions are important.

> The Chinese government demanded that all businesses censor content, but...

To distinguish this further:

> The Chinese government demanded that all foreign businesses engage in a significant violation of basic human rights, but...

That distinction materially impacts the rest of the argument for me.

People usually reply here with the false equivalence that the US banning misleading advertisements or child pornography is somehow equivalent to Xi Jinping's campaign against what he calls "historical nihilism" (but the rest of the world calls "history"). I don't really understand how those are the same though.

> leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill

A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety.

The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.

Important points to consider, I'm open to updating my views here.

> You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts,

It's actually the reverse, I've become more skeptical because so many recycling programs are now just landfilling plastic because the costs no longer justify recycling it.

The price of oil should tell us something about the relative efficiency of recycling plastic. It would be weird if there was zero relation.

Oil prices being consistently low for a decade probably contribute to shifting efficiencies here.

I worry more generally about reuse and recycle heuristics since early environmental impact studies showed they frequently produce bad results. But that doesn't mean they always do.

Maybe you're right and those input factors haven't changed enough to affect the total cost math.

Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study.

Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.

The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions.

One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash.

They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three studies and picked the conclusions they liked best.

Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks.

Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases.

Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale.

There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."

Arguably China should have targeted purple states rather than red states. Most states that thrive on soybeans are unlikely to flip regardless of pressure.

Edit: The EU might have had a better strategy with the rust belt...

Second edit: I mean, no one should target anyone, I don't want anyone to suffer here, I was just surprised that their electoral college math is so poor for such an otherwise calculated strategy.

I think there are different counters that will resonate for different people:

You can oppose banning/weakening encryption because you believe encryption is an irreplaceable tool for security.

You can oppose banning encryption because you believe that would actually be an ineffective tactic for preventing crime.

You can oppose banning encryption because you believe such bans violate inherent civil liberties.

There's another one that's really hard for me to explain -- You can oppose banning encryption because you've read Shannon or have a general sense of how RC4 worked and it feels just gross to ban basic operations, like shuffling information in a particular way. It's a bit like banning addition, or like banning pig latin.

I hear rebuttals and debates around the first three, but I don't think there's an effective rebuttal to the last one, which is just a paradigm shift. It's like, "I don't support this because I do not understand information the way you do."

Maybe we should print copies of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and leave them in hotel rooms, like the Gideons do with Bibles.

> The bottom of the ocean would be far more habitable if we faced any type of extinction event.

Yeah, space has a coolness factor, and there are things about the origin of the universe we can't learn from the bottom of the ocean, but an underwater station is one of the most underrated projects humanity could pursue.

Oceans are phenomenal shields against radiation, extreme weather, or even the temporary combustion of the atmosphere, should things get that bad. The opportunity to learn about groups surviving in isolated habitats, or about megastructures that have to survive hostile external environments, could even provide really useful lessons for space.

I think you're right, this is the best argument against.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[0] deals with this a great deal, the early scientists pretty quickly devolve into two camps, terraformers and preservationists. There's a lot of other things going on as well, but this is one subplot.

At one point in the book, a terraformer made the argument if we discovered life on Mars we'd never know how or when it got there anyway. The monkeys in South America are an interesting parallel - total mystery. Best hunch is that some survivable population "rafted" across the Atlantic at some point - under conditions somehow rare enough to have happened exactly once in 40 million years.

KSR doesn't explicitly take a side, but seems to think that terraforming will be inevitable, so we might as well get on with it.

On the other hand, Mars may not be terraformable.[1] The challenges there are so extensive as to possibly be insurmountable. Consider that we are so accustomed to certain environmental conditions that changes so subtle as working extended hours in a popcorn factory can give us cancer.[2] Mars just has toxic soil, a low enough gravity as to probably prevent a sustainable atmosphere, and is constantly bombarded with radiation.

But who knows, futurism is hard because humanity is pretty ingenious.

Isaac Arthur has an extended video on terraforming that's worth watching if you want to dive deeply into this topic.[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenge...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#Diace...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikoNQNj9ZnU

Did anyone actually read why these magazines were "highly ranked"?

> the CIA actually thought that Levitas’s anti-Communism was too ferocious, unrelenting, and “conservative.” ... the CIA wanted a more moderate and “sophisticated” voice ... The New Leader remained progressive in the context of U.S. domestic politics; it was one of the first publications to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

> Like other magazines affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo published essays critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and Vietnam. Its usefulness, from the U.S. government’s point of view, consisted in its defense of the responsibility of the artist as an independent critic of power ...

I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity.

I mean, of all the dirty secret squirrel things governments do, if I had to pick, then (1) funding the early publication of 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' and (2) encouraging artists to challenge entrenched power (to include US policy) would be pretty high on my list.

Funny, I was just reading an article about WIRED's startup of the week, Velocity, an app pushing for transactionless restaurants, kind of the same way Uber takes the payment step out of cabs. (ie, you still pay, but it's not a big process.)

BBC focuses on BTC, but maybe apps are the best path to the death of cash.

Of course you never truly get rid of an anonymous fungible medium of exchange. There were a surge in Tide detergent thefts starting a few years back, to use it as a currency.

1. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/24/startup-of-th...

2. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-are-...

3. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-tide-black-market-2013-1?...

4. http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/

Music lockers sort of terrify me.

I know there've been lots of complaints about them before,[0] and I think most of the early complaints are actually resolved now. But I still have a lingering bad feeling...

After playing a series of MMOs that subsequently died, or online games that then lost all their servers, I'm just really wary of putting all my trust in a central server somewhere.

Companies can die, or sell off parts of their business, make strange decisions about UI or storage without noticing how it destroys someone's music in edge cases.

I guess you're covered as long as you backup your music on a NAS too... but it's not crazy to assume you shouldn't have to do that, so I don't blame the author.

[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/29/music-lockers...

> This article therefore advocates for setting "intellectual property" controls too far towards the owner/firm's favor.

I don't think that's an accurate read of the article.

If you make it to the last paragraph it just says there are no right answers. and argues against both abolishing all IP and against perpetual rights for rightsholders.

If anything, the sin of the article is that it stakes out a completely pedestrian claim (IP should exist and apply for limited times) after dressing it up with a provocative intro.

That aside, there is some practical wisdom that could have been extracted from the provocative intro. When you're making a pitch, you have to explain to the investor how you're angling for monopolistic rents. Or, ok, maybe you don't use the "m" word, but you dress it up more softly as why you're uniquely positioned or skilled to help serve the market / seize this new opportunity. It all boils down to the same thing though: why shouldn't they just invest in Walmart?

> there is no 'day job' that musicians can work

"Fronting a band that gets airplay" is a narrow version of working musicians do. Those just happen to be the most prominent and famous musicians in the US right now, but they're a tiny, tiny slice of working musicians.

Some people show up at advertising firms and write jingles. Some compose arrangements for films. Some studio musicians show up every day, provide background drums or bass for a hundred different singers, without really getting any credit. The most reliable "gig" players I know play weddings, and they make a decent amount of cash. Others play jazz four or five nights a week, often with different fellow players every session. Almost every major city has a symphony. Many working musicians I know also teach.

We need to stop analyzing the music industry by pretending it consists entirely of Trent Reznor and Carly Rae Jepsen.

| I wonder if new insurance files will have any influence on the actions of their enemies.

Even without that, no effect. Blackmailing a bureaucracy... it's not like dealing with a single rational actor. That's the Hollywood version of Washington.

It's like coming upon a traffic jam and deciding you should bribe those responsible so you can go on your way.