Is happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical reaction?
Readit Newstjs8rj commented on Why aren't smart people happier? theseedsofscience.pub/p/w... · Posted by u/zdw
I think we should do more albedo engineering. like white roads and car roofs.
Back-of-the-envelope
- Road area. World road length ≈ 60–70 million km. Using an average paved width of ~8–10 m ⇒ area ≈ (0.9–1.3)×10¹² m². Earth’s surface is 5.1×10¹⁴ m², so roads cover ~0.09–0.13% of the planet.
- Albedo change. Dark asphalt is ~0.05–0.10. “White” coatings can push toward ~0.4–0.6 (fresh), but weathering quickly dulls them. So a plausible Δalbedo for roads is +0.2 to +0.5.
- Global albedo change. Δα_global ≈ (road fraction) × (Δalbedo_road) ≈ (0.001)×(0.2–0.5) ≈ +0.0002 to +0.0005.
- Radiative forcing. Globally averaged incoming sunlight ≈ S₀/4 ≈ 340 W m⁻². Forcing from an albedo change is ΔF ≈ −Δα_global × 340 ≈ −0.07 to −0.17 W m⁻².
- Temperature response. Using a standard sensitivity ~0.8 °C per W m⁻² (≈3 °C per CO₂ doubling): ΔT ≈ −0.05 to −0.14 °C at equilibrium.
tjs8rj commented on Colombia's president says boat struck by US was carrying Colombians bbc.com/news/articles/c89... · Posted by u/jp191919
The recent US strikes on vessels in the Caribbean appear to violate Maritime Law and international human rights standards. Given the US Navy’s global reach and legal expertise, ignorance is not a plausible defense. These actions suggest the administration may be testing the limits of executive power on the open sea - an authoritarian power grab cloaked in counter-narcotics rhetoric.
Or the simpler answer: there’s a drug problem in the US and people want solutions.
The republicans make a show of solving it by “blowing up boats carrying drugs”. Democrats make a show of solving it with their own ideas
The republican base likes blowing up drug boats
I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.
Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp?
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
i think it could be argued that sure, 20 Googles would be better for US power, yes. why wouldn’t it be? it would drive more innovation which likely would only increase our influence on multiple levels.
there could be more reason to argue it would absolutely be more secure—if any of these tech giants or one of the people inside were to sell us out it could be very very bad. if one or two out of twenty were to sell us out, the damage is much much less severe.
not to mention we’re significantly stronger as a country when we have diversity of ideas leading to diversity in innovation which the dominance from a tiny few just entirely undermines.
As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, distribute propaganda.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few state-sponsored monopolies e.g. the East India Company. They all lost ground to economies with more numerous and competitive companies, most notably the U.S.
Really? 20 mid sized Googles is better for US power than 1 mega Google dominating the planet? Repeat for any corporation.
Breaking these megacorps benefits little guys like you and me, but I doubt it benefits state power on the global stage
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.
I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
Nah, social sciences don't say that. It's a common misconception - borne out of people who don't want to engage with what they're actually saying, or from engaging with people who don't know what social sciences actually say.
All they really say is some people have an advantage. It doesn't mean they have it easy. We get advantages from all parts of life, and refusing to engage with recognizing them is a decision, but I don't find it particularly healthy.
Due to various reasons outside of my control, my life has been objectively easier than others. It doesn't mean it was easy. Just easier. If even one or two of those things changed my life could have ended up very different.
White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place.
A Japanese person has Japanese privilege in Japan, an Egyptian in Egypt, etc
If you’re “culturally American” in America (regardless of race), you will benefit.
If you’re White and culturally American in parts of America where White American culture dominates (like our institutions, which reflect a country that has been historically 90%+ White), you will benefit
If you’re White and in a place where non White culture dominates, you will be relatively disadvantaged. Most countries around the world, and even parts of the US (parts of Chicago where you have significant disadvantages from being White).
These are good insights. I think it is perhaps also worth noting that even the individuals who succeed on their own merit do so with a lot of luck, and it may not always be obvious to them the luck was there.
Milton Hershey is known for his candy company. Somewhat less known is the fact that his successful candy company was his fourth; his three previous bankrupted (mostly due to fluctuations in prices moving candy from tenable to untenable as a business) and he'd burned through so much of the family fortune pursuing them that his relatives cut him off from further loans. His father before him had liquidated his own piece of the family fortune speculating on opportunities. It could easily have been the case that those speculations might have paid off, which would have made Hershey the son elite category 1 (in status); similarly, if Hershey hadn't found one last source of investment money from a former employee, his candy-making aspirations would have ended when the family cut him off and we wouldn't know his story at all.
The system of stories we tell ourselves highlights the merit and downplays the luck; we don't remember the failure cases, including, often, the failures that predated the success. A lot of people who lacked support, didn't know there was a system to be leveraged, and grinded as far as they could before something critical broke are out there; they just don't get to give TED talks on what complete failure tastes like. Nobody gets to hear the lecture from Henry Hershey on "I mortgaged my family's future on opportunities that, had they paid off, would have made my son and wife wealthy and comfortable for the rest of their days... But none of them paid off and it was all ultimately objectively wasted effort, energy that would have been better spent tending a modest homestead and making it thrive in a small but sustainable way."
Great to acknowledge luck but too often it’s used as an excuse. Even the story you laid out has to do with a lot of persistence, grit, determination, learning from mistakes, etc
A better way of putting it is probably: barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough. And even if you get terribly lucky, it just makes your odds worse - there are people out there who’ve had worse luck than you and still became more successful than you.