What are the inputs to this framework? Are we going "What happens if we defund the police?" in isolation or are we asking what happens if we take the money from the police and put it into housing, into medicare, into other social programs? The answers you arrive at might be different.
In fact if we extrapolate that line of reasoning out to the capitalist substrate of our economy we might find some surprising second, third+ order effects.
> or are we asking what happens if we take the money from the police and put it into housing, into medicare, into other social programs? The answers you arrive at might be different.
There's two different questions. Combining the two will give you both answers you'd expect, not one or the other. And there's way too much going on to try and tackle both at the same time.
You could say "defund police marginally increases crime" and "increasing housing greatly reduces crime" but to what extent? And within what timeframes? Defunding the police could provide outcomes immediately, but to provide housing to a point where crime is reduced would most likely be a slow strong growth thing, that will take a generation or two to come about.
I'm not saying it's unimportant to look at both, but looking at them separately will be more realistic, and thankfully money is such an abstract resource that things can be separated like that.
> "We can find some surprising second and third order effects"
I think we don't quite want surprises when it comes to the safety and livelihood of many, and their generations.
It takes centuries to grow a forest and only a day to burn it down.
As far as I know one of the arguments for defunding the police is that the police is used as a way for those with the ability to change things to externalize the consequences of their actions.
When for example a lack of housing leads to an increase in crime a well funded police prevents those who could increase housing from being affected by the crime and they will therefor not increase housing. Especially as they get many benefits from poverty like cheap labour, a decrease in competition and larger premiums on attractive real estate.
So yes I would say they are thinking about the second-order effects. At some point I might read some of Thomas Sowell's writings but from what I've seen so far he honestly seems more of a theologist than a scientist to me.
This volcano can be responsible for "10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere",
and "The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more",
and this will "eat away at the ozone layer".
We've known that H2O is what most absorbs infrared in the atmosphere for 150 years; the thing is that how much H2O exists in the atmosphere is a function of temperature, and with the exception of an event like this volcanic eruption, only of temperature. So H2O can't be the ultimate cause of variation in temperature because it is the effect. It is the (small) increase in temperature from the increase in CO2 that makes it possible for the atmosphere to hold more H2O which in turn dramatically amplifies the the increase in temperature.
None of this is in doubt, none of this is new. The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius[0] modeled this feedback to a reasonable approximation in 1896.
As for the H2O from this eruption, it may seem like a lot of water, and relative to the normal amount in the stratosphere it is, but that's because of all the H2O in the atmosphere the stratosphere contains only the tiniest fraction (because it's cold up there). Most of the H2O is near the ground, and that's where most of the IR absorption happens. So this thing isn't going to have a big effect on the greenhouse effect, which is why they talk more about what it might do to the ozone layer.
And as for the paper you cited... looks like it was written by a bunch of old (retired) engineers who have absolutely no clue about actual atmospheric science.
My understanding of that paper is that it does not dispute the feedback effects, but rather seeks to quantify them, specifically the climate sensitivity for CO2, CH4 and N2O.
> And as for the paper you cited... looks like it was written by a bunch of old (retired) engineers who have absolutely no clue about actual atmospheric science.
Surely if their approach is valid, and the maths is correct, then who they are, their age, and their field of expertise is irrelevant?
Now admittedly I've only got part way through the paper, but I've yet to find an error in their maths.
I therefor assume that either you have found an error in their maths, or that you can state why their approach is invalid. I'd appreciate it if you could explicitly state those failings.
This looks pretty useful and I will definitely be trying it out. I see you can upload CSV files for visualizing. Is there a way to send data as it's generated?
Another question would it be possible for Marple to use the data locally (or from say my own s3 bucket or database) instead of having to upload it to your servers?
[...] use data locally instead of having to upload it to your servers?
No, not yet. We are however prototyping an influxdb integration. Would that cover your use case?
Yeah, the solar lensing point is WAY the hell out there: since 1 AU is 8 light-minutes, so the 548 AU minimum works out to 73 light-hours away. When LIGHT takes half a week to make a one-way trip, you're in the deep space boondocks, folks.
I haven't read the paper yet, but this thing would have to have a fair amount of nuclear power, and comms would be a challenge as well. As the abstract mentions, though, while the project has a high degree of difficulty, there appear to be no complete technology showstoppers to actually doing this, so it's at least as doable (and considerably cheaper than) a von Braun-style centrifugal space station in Earth orbit.
It'll be interesting to see if the idea gets any traction...
The solar system explorer view they have on that page is fantastic!
I recommend clicking on the "solar system" toggle in the bottom middle of the view. It gives you a real sense of the planets, probes, asteroids etc that are flying around our solar system.
Also reminds me of looking at air traffic control maps and what that might look like once intra-solar system space travel becomes routine.
One issue would be slowing down when you get there.
You'd need to carry a deployable/detachable mirror with you to reflect the laser back at the craft, but that mirror itself would also get accelerated further out, which means having to correct for that, etc., etc.
With a solar sail you can "tack" by reflecting photons against your tangential velocity – but that only works if the tangential component is indeed what you want to shed. Getting rid of radial velocity is more difficult, and in a hyperbolic (escape) orbit radial is mostly what you have.
Not really, it's the velocity the "Breakthrough Starshot" probes would reach. They propose[1] that launching each probe would take 84 GWh, which is not super much (about 15 times more than a space shuttle launch), but of course the Starshot probes would be much lighter than this proposed telescope so it's not directly comparable.
If we assume the meter class telescope + power supplies and whatever else masses ~ 1 metric ton, it would take 1,853,298,442,530,598,439 Joules - 1.8 quintillion - 1.853 * 10^18 - to accelerate it to .2c. Only ~ 442 Megatons of TNT. Keep in mind, that is assuming 100% efficiency, which would be impossible with a light sail or any other known technology.
With all the various inefficiencies in power collection/generation, laser generation, momentum/power transfer, etc. we'd be talking probably somewhere around 5% end-to-end power transfer - if we were lucky. Which is still way better than the rocket equation (probably).
So to get the required 1.853 * 10^18 J at 5% efficiency, we'd need say 20x more power at earth to accelerate it (if 5% efficiency). So 3.706 * 10^19 J. Which starts get more concerning, at 8,840 gigatons of TNT.
Let's take the most efficient means we can imagine to produce energy, direct matter annihilation. Annihilating 1KG of mass (using 500g of Anti-matter, 500g of Matter) produces 8.986 * 10^16 J of energy. If we could somehow feed the resulting energy directly into the laser for accelerating the craft, and assume near 100% efficiency in doing so, before laser losses - we'd only need roughly 1000 KG of matter/anti-matter to do so.
Not bad!
But wait, our more likely end-to-end efficiency is at best 1%. Hmm. Which would require 100 times the input energy to spacecraft acceleration. 44 Gigatons of TNT or 1.853 * 10^20 J.
5KG of matter/antimatter.
Which is definitely not a significant fraction of earths mass, but yikes. I wouldn't want to pay that energy bill!
51,480,512,292,500 kWh (the 'wall plug equivalent') at my current rates would be $26 trillion dollars!
Exactly. Perhaps one of the biggest barriers slowing down solutions to problems caused by demographic collapse = people not being willing to discuss demographic collapse merely because some racist/religiously extreme groups refer to demographic shifts in some of their arguments.
Just because hitler self-identified as a vegetarian doesn't mean that other people who self-identify as vegetarians condone Hitler's views.
Something like this needs trigger warnings. That's a way to start breaking down those barriers. People won't engage seriously unless they're presented with something seems a little less like stealth hate speech.
There is nothing to embellish or present. When the numbers are still going up it's obvious that the person complaining or being concerned only has their stance because they think they are going up in the wrong places.
It's better not to embellish , at least DJT was honest and didn't try to pretend he said something else.
Sure you can have this "discussion" but it comes off as needless (and probably racist) concern trolling. The Sweden thing is a favorite among reactionaries trying to mask their racism. The homicide rate in Sweden is lower than Canada. It's lower than Finland.
Indeed Sweden as a whole is safe, but organized crime related gun violence has become a problem of different size than here in Finland for example. It's quite worrying as gunfights between gangs do carry a high risk to other people who just happen to be nearby. A typical stabbing at least here in Finland involves drunks or drug addicts and happens in a private apartment.
On page 12 you can see statistic of gun-violence related deaths per million inhabitants in Nordic countries. Sweden is clearly doing worse than other countries, where overall trend has been declining rather than rising. The higher rates in Finland at the beginning are due to statistics also including stabbings.
yeah but it was private and presumably a pretty limited number of people knew about it at the time which narrows down the number of potential candidates pretty considerably.
There are so many other ways to do this that are infinitely harder to track. Suppose token X is going to hockey stick. You can short a derivative that shorts X. You can long a derivative that longs X. You can leverage a lending protocol that contains X. Etc.
"Buying X when X will go up" has got the be the most unsophisticated way possible one can leverage insider information. Not to mention a basically guaranteed way to get caught.
In fact if we extrapolate that line of reasoning out to the capitalist substrate of our economy we might find some surprising second, third+ order effects.