Thank you for taking the patience to put this into words so nicely! I really appreciate your perspective. Maybe I was being too rude calling Republicans “dumb”, I apologize. I guess I’m just as angry as many other people at seeing the proposed Republican plans (especially “slashing public spending” a.k.a. reducing social welfare) and seeing people actually vote for that.

Yeah, people in the US want change. I’m not sure what would be a productive and viable proposal that doesn’t completely fuck up the country. I’m European and have a non-interference policy for myself when it comes to the internals of the US. In other words, I don’t want to meddle too much with what’s going on in the US.

Just curious but are we heading towards an “eat the rich” society?

I guess we should be, but that’s just my personal opinion.

Realistically, no. The people have clearly expressed how dumb they are and what they desire in the November election. They want dumb Republicans, they get asshole CEOs. I don’t see it any other way.

Honestly, I believe voting is the best way to bring change about a society that wants to change. It’s just that I have given up the thought that the US wants to change in the direction that I would go. So no, it’s not gonna happen.

In real life I think a similar situation holds. First we have to make a distinction between a system having randomness; a completely unpredictable outcome and being chaotic; where the outcome is theoretically predictable but varies significantly with even tiny changes in input.

Yes, thank you for putting it so nicely into words. I was already aware of that distinction.

I’m studying physics right now and trying to organize my thoughts around that. I remember we talked about some mechanical contraption that exhibits non-deterministic (i.e. purely random) behavior due to the equations of motion having non-unique solution. If I remember correctly, it was a kind of “knife standing on its tip right at the edge of a cliff”-edge condition. There’s two solutions to that: It stands still or it falls down. There’s two distinctly different solutions because the equations of motion are non-continuous, i.e. even for the tiniest change in position, the net force changes from 0 to 1g.

Apart from that, there’s some more “pure random” stuff that I’m investigating into right now, like quantum stuff (as you mentioned). But there’s at least one more example that I’d like to think about:

A human/robot cannot fully predict their own future. That is because if they could, they could become aware of it and decidedly act against it. For example, if I predict that I will eat an avocado tomorrow, I might stop myself from doing that. So the prediction becomes wrong. In a certain sense, therefore one cannot predict their own actions. This isn’t due to a lack in accuracy, but it’s fundamentally impossible. I guess. Let me hear your thoughts! Your words are calm and collected; you seem to know stuff.

Btw, off topic; do you believe in true randomness? In other words, do you think that certain physics processes simply have an unpredictable outcome? (I’m asking because your response implies “No”, but I believe it is “yes”.)

that makes sense, yeah

Shootings in kindergardens should not get less attention that shootings at CEOs.

I’m not sure whether having deterministic behavior is a core characteristic of robots, but if so, I highly doubt that it makes a lot of sense to see me as a robot, because my behavior sure is random!

How many years before robots will take over the economy and rule the world?

There’s one more outlier though which is Electrochemical cell, like galvanic element or voltaic pile

It was used around 1800 as a major electricity source, but I guess it quickly became uneconomical in 1866 or sth when the dynamo was invented.

Edit: wait yes, it actually says this in the second paragraph of the linked article:

The entire 19th-century electrical industry was powered by batteries related to Volta’s (e.g. the Daniell cell and Grove cell) until the advent of the dynamo (the electrical generator) in the 1870s.

So, I don’t know why you’re taking a stand for Uranium today. It used to be a good technology 30 years ago, but today it just doesn’t make any sense anymore.

First factor is cost. Renewables (Solar + Wind especially) have really really gone down in cost (see this link and this link), and the population will favor the energy source that is cheaper in the long run.

Secondly, the environmental impact of solar is really not that big. When we talk about how much CO2 solar produces, it’s mostly because that solar needs silicon and that needs energy to be purified. And that energy mostly comes from coal, gas or other non-renewables today. But guess what, as the solar revolution progresses, that emission goes down as well, so solar actually becomes more environmentally friendly over time.

tbf, we have airplanes, but most goods are still being transported over lands or seas.

Well but they’re not around anymore because the uranium inside them is all consumed by now, right?

endergirl

It’s less cold than it looks, i’ve tried that.

Snow is an excellent thermal insulator, and the air in that chamber can be quite warm, like 15°C, without really melting the snow.

Computer programmers are the wizards of the present.