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  • Probably sooner than that. The "Pope" as we know it is an office that evolved later, though the Catholic church claims the line goes back to the Apostle Peter.

    The stories in the gospels are a collection of stories that had been circulating orally among the first century Christians, and got written down mostly in the late second half of that century. Mary likely never claimed a virgin birth at all; that was invented by the oral tradition. Pretty much everything about Jesus childhood is made up to push certain religious narratives.

    Which itself is sometimes interesting to follow. The whole census story behind Jesus birth, for instance, is almost certainly made up. Why would Rome require everyone to go back to their birth city to register? That's hugely disruptive to everyday life if people have to travel days or weeks just to fill out some paperwork. But why did they stick that in there? One good answer is that the particular group who wrote that section of the gospels--it doesn't appear in all of them--really wanted to connect Jesus to King David and Bethlehem, but everyone knows Jesus is from Nazareth. So they stick this convoluted census story in there to have a reason for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem instead of Nazareth.

  • Let's clear some terms. Intelligence and consciousness are separate things that our language tends to conflate. Consciousness is the interpretation of sensory input. Hallucinations are what happen when your consciousness is misinterpreting that data.

    You actually hallucinate to a minor degree all the time. For instance, pareidolia often takes the form of seeing human faces in rocks and clouds. Our consciousness is really tuned to patterns that look like human faces, and it sometimes gets it wrong.

    We can actually do this to image recognition models. A model was tuned to finding dogs in movies. It could then modify the movie to show what it thought was there. It was then deliberately overtrained, and it output a movie with dogs all over the place.

    The models definitely have some level of consciousness. Maybe not a lot, but some.

    This is what I like about AI research. We learn about our own minds while studying it. But capitalism isn't using it in ways that are net helpful to humanity.

  • It removes the "hope intelligent life evolves fast enough".

    If it was only Uraniam, then you need U-235. That has a half life of about 700M years. Cut in half 2 more times, and there's almost none left. So if intelligent life took another 1.5B years to develop on Earth (which it easily could have), then that path is cut off.

    With Thorium, the sun would probably expand to a red giant first.

  • Thorium-232 has an extremely long half life (longer than the age of the universe) and it's reasonably abundant. That's the isotope useful for the thorium fuel cycle.

    So it's not quite that bad for threading this needle. The fuel cycle is a little more complicated than uranium--it's not fertile as it is--and that could slow down R&D of a new nuclear program by getting stuck at some step.

  • Yes, that's probably correct. It'll be late in the race, because both of them are pig headed and want the other one to do it. That will only drag down whomever does end up staying in. It'll be a glorious game of political chicken. I'm ordering all the popcorn now.

  • How data driven are cartels, anyway? Seems like they should be getting stats on loss rate to busts and calculating that in. They run as a business and want real numbers.

    They're a group that builds their own autonomous submarines. They gotta be calculating this.

  • Just a note on the timeline. Reagan's policies were already in full swing by the time Hillary wrote that book. The Clintons were political nobodies from Arkansas when Reagan was in office. Bill was governor, but can you name the governor of Arkansas today without looking it up? I'm guessing most people outside the state can't.

  • My numbers were wrong:

    https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

    Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is "soft costs", and labor is included in it, but it's a pretty small fraction of it. The "other" soft costs are the big thing--stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

    Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn't even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.