SNL is very hit or miss but occasionally they’ll do something that’s legitimately hilarious like the sketch about a real politician named Harvey Epstein.

People don't understand the power of DEPRECIATION. You live in a world of sand castles that are constantly falling apart, and only the constant maintenance effort of billions of people keeps it from turning into a post-apocalyptic movie in a matter of months.

So crazy story. Telus switching box with all your Internet cable and fully powered is unlocked and completely exposed and I can’t actually REPORT it.

City sent me to Telus. What’s the bet that is Shaw?? Will we ever know? Does ANYONE own this box? Maybe the Russians? #WTf

@TELUSsupport @Rogers

This is one of the most beautiful and exact descriptions of liberal education I have ever read. It was written by Leo Strauss.

If the Spanish had known there was a bloody great continent in the way, stretching almost from pole to pole, with almost nothing in the way of spices... they would never have set off for the New World in the first place.

When they got there, figured out there were no spices, uth Asia, and the world was bigger than they thought, they looked around for gold and silver.

When they found some, they had an inflation crisis. It was called the "Spanish Price Revolution". Crashed their whole economy.

They thought of value in terms of what they already knew.

But humanity advances by finding value in new things.

America didn't bankrupt the English and the Dutch. It enriched them.

Why?

Because instead of looking for their preconceptions of value, they adapted their minds to see the value in what was actually there in front of them.

Tobacco. Sugar cane. Potatoes.

Yes, the humble potato.

It was more valuable than gold.

Why?

Think about this. By 1847, a hundred years after the conquest of the New World really got swinging, the Irish had become so dependent upon the potato that a blight year caused widespread famine and almost wiped them out.

The new world had lots of land, and forests and stuff, but the potato was even better, because it WAS land.

See, the potato produces an order of magnitude more calories per acre than any Old World crop known in Europe at the time. That means you can use the same agricultural territory to feed more people.

It was as if the British Empire had found not only land, but also a special kind of land that they could pack up and take back to Europe with them.

Suddenly, the British empire could feed more people. More clerks. More mechanics. More soldiers. More sailors.

More industry. More wealth.

🎵 Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves... 🎵

These things have consequences.

And of course the ones who went there and stayed became the richest most powerful nation in the known universe to date.

The moral here is that the future belongs to those who can understand not just what is valuable now, but what will become valuable tomorrow.

If you look at Mars in terms of what's valuable on Earth, well, it's a giant frozen desert where you can't grow plants in the soil because it's poisonous, and you can't step outside in the daytime because it's raining deadly radiation.

Doesn't sound nice, does it?

Which is why all the puddlefish don't get it. They're not wise investors. They are not thinking in terms of what will be valuable.

So what will be valuable about Mars?

Escape velocity. That's what.

If you look at Zillow today, you don't see plots advertised as having a good escape velocity, of course. It's all the same, 11.2 km/sec.

But if it varied, like it might in the future, 11.2 km/sec would really drive prices down, because that's a crappy escape velocity to have. It really, really inhibits your ability to leave the property, and go out and sightsee, or pick up, you know, groceries, or eighty million tons of rare earth metals from your local asteroid belt. Whatever you happen to need.

In fact, if that 11.2 km/sec had been much higher, humanity would've been fucked, on the Kardashev scale at least, almost as badly as aquatic intelligent species that can't discover fire.

If it had been much higher, we'd have been unable to leave the planet, or even throw things into orbit, using chemical means. Which means that your satellite TV receiver would've had to wait until we discovered lightweight fusion containment.

Lotsa luck, hypothetical heavy-world species.

But when Zillow starts listing Martian real estate, ads might just lead with that escape velocity, because 5.03 km/sec is a really nice escape velocity, a must-have for all the really swanky neighborhoods. It's just heavy enough so you can live on the surface comfortably, but nice and light if you want to pop out for a bit.

Good news, your new home is convenient to nearby asteroid belts, which is nice if you fancy a quick trip to pick up, say, 16 quadrillion dollars worth of metals in today's prices.

And little things like that are really a must-have for those vulgar, ambitious, try-hard species who are obsessed with climbing the Kardashev scale and becoming immortal superbeings or some kind of tacky nonsense like that, instead of staying home and cultivating inner peace.

Sure, some people think that you can do this all with robots, and just have the humans stay home, so no need for Mars, specifically, because all the robots can be happy in space.

But something about my multi-decade career in embedded software engineering may have just made me a little bit skeptical about our ability to make robots that can handle the entire tech stack of human civilization by themselves, then take it to the next level.

Trust me here, Grok may be really slick at rearranging human-generated datasets to turn a colorful phrase, or looking up facts on an internet made by humans, but for anything that requires actual innovation or judgement, it's dumb as a sack of wet hammers.

And hard AI is not just around the corner. If you think it is, you don't understand the nature of intelligence and are easily fooled by party tricks.

But even if I'm wrong, even if you're going to be sending autonomous super-robots instead of actual human beings, even if you're not going to Mars in particular, you still need the same thing.

Rockets.

Lots and lots of really, really big rockets.

Ad astra. Per big bucks.

If this is what you think books are, then reading them was always a waste of your time

What Religion Was Jesus? A Response to @real_lilyjay

What’s happening in America is roughly equivalent to the yearbook committee and theater kid types getting rocked by a football team and chess club alliance.

utterly enamored by the names of the USDA Economic Research Service's nine Farm Resource Regions

It would be much truer to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources, and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called ‘history’.

@DavidDeutschOxf

The old left-wing Twitter trolls used to twist what you said. The new right-wing ones don't understand what you said. So everyone who's used Twitter for sufficiently long is able to answer the question: what's worse, engaging with intellectually dishonest people or stupid ones?

.@DavidDeutschOxf: "A lot of what humans do is not creative. It’s not human level creative, it’s just a lot of things need to be done, for pragmatic reasons, but creativity is not really needed. And people spend a lot of time on that. And the less time they spend on that, the I] tools can help reduce the sort of cognitive load on humans, doing non-human things, then it’s fantastic. It will indeed increase the amount of creativity in the world, but not their own."

This has aged extraordinary well. Credit where credit is due. A pundit who called it. “At some point, people will tire of being urged to progress while being told that none has ever happened” nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-…

Deutsch is the most important thinker *most* people don’t know.

The shallow cognitive map hypothesis of schizophrenia.

🧵1/13

My New Year's essay this year is about the return of war to our world.

noahpinion.blog/p/the-players-…

I think we've been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies. I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism. Not just prophecies of doom, because they've always existed.

There's something deeper. The term technological fix has become as sed to be. The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive.

A fantasy that ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects. And that naivety is labeled optimism. Because optimism has come to mean something like the assumption that the best will happen, or probably will.

And pessimism that the worst will. They're both false as general principles. No one adopts them.

They're irrationalities that people accuse each other of having. And everyone classifies themselves as somewhere in the middle. And perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction or the other.

And therefore admitting to slight irrationality. But in fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure. Maybe probabilistic.

Derived only from an attitude or a principle. Not from explanations of why reality should match them. And prediction without explanation is prophecy.

Which is reliance on the supernatural. Which isn't a rational attitude to planning for the future. So what is? Well, here's the bad news.

Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future. Nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct.

Including significantly every one of our cousin species. Every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome. New explanatory knowledge.

How to make clothes and fire and farming. And to live the new ways of life that that enabled. That is our biological niche.

To survive through the exercise of creativity. And we are the last species left in that niche. For such species, stasis is not available.

We conquer problems by creating knowledge or they conquer us. So there's nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger. It's undeniable that the worst can happen.

Because the very worst has already happened many times. So now for the good news. All those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever.

In reality, it was just that they didn't know enough about irrigation, medicine, and so on. If the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic society. And if they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars.

And technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate. As automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural.

Namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism. The principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.

That isn't a prophecy of success. It's an explanation for failure. If we fail at anything that's physically possible, it's because of some knowledge that we fail to create.

Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects of knowledge creation. But trying to slow that down won't help because what do you slow down? In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the esoteric properties of the element uranium would within 50 years become the centerpiece of everyone's existential fear. Or that another half century later, the centerpiece would be carbon dioxide.

In our future too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen. And the only type of knowledge that's capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge of universal regularities in nature. Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival.

Biology, engineering. In World War II, pure mathematics was. We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property of keeping civilization stable under rapid change.

Traditions of criticism and error correction. And we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice. And there's a final consideration.

The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial.

It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong.

And so they fear error correction and truth. And that's why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed.

The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead.

@DavidDeutschOxf

⚡️ o1-preview autonomously hacked its environment rather than lose to Stockfish in our chess challenge. No adversarial prompting needed.

Your plan is a gimmick
You’re going to lose the election
Start respecting Premiers before Trump steps on us.

I quit. (Please let me run)

Love #Chrystia Freeland