I also switched to controld after a period of unreliability from from NextDNS. NextDNS is a little easier and a little faster, and perhaps better for auditing a network, but controld overall has more features. Differentiators: more granular control in blocking related functionality, can replace your VPN for certain use cases, control over traffic flow and proxying, etc
Descent holds a special place for me, as it was the first game I ever saw played on a PC (I watched my dad play when I was five, ~30 years ago). I recently was able to reminisce by playing the modern successor, Overload: https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
I'd recommend "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt as some pre-work. It's about the psychological foundations of morality and ethics which factor into the formation of religions and rituals, including rituals like college football games.
> the uniform ultimate backdrop we have when looking in any direction
Is the CMB exactly uniform in every direction? Or is this early light slightly more redshifted when we look up versus when we look down or left or right? Does the oldest light we see in any given direction vary slightly in color?
I'm imagining the universe expanding as a sphere from a central point, but we're located off-center. Wouldn't the early infrared photons emitted from the other side of the central point of expansion from us be observed by us now as a slightly different color than the early infrared photons emitted closer to the edge of the early expanding universe?
A rabbit hole of questions:
- When did space start expanding?
- Did it have to rapidly expand for 400k years as extreme forces propelled matter apart?
- Was that expansion faster or slower than the current expansion of space between galaxy groups?
- Is expansion uniform across the universe?
- Or is expansion slower closest to the original center of the universe?
- Maybe there's a central point in the universe that's not moving relative to a reference frame outside our universe?
- Is space discrete or continuous?
- As space expands do new "units" of space appear between units of space that have grown farther apart?
- If not, wouldn't physics work differently for areas of space where the units of space have grown farther apart than areas of space where the units of space aren't as far apart?
There is a very obvious dipole in the CMB due to our peculiar velocity. This has been removed in almost all images you saw because it's just an artifact of our particular movement and not physical. It's just the Doppler effect.
I've driven past Oso many times in the last few years—it's a solemn drive. It's also a tiny reminder of the planet's ability to shrug its shoulders and wipe out civilizations.
We recently had a maddening experience with Airbnb. We booked a long-term rental (~3 months) while our home got worked on, costing $10k+ USD (so Airbnb made a couple thousand bucks?). During our stay, we paid for our OWN cleaners to clean the house every other week and made of a video walkthrough of the house demonstrating its cleanliness. All went well until after we checked out.
The host had been living outside the US for the last couple years, and hadn't seen their house in person for a very long time. They happened to come back after we checked out, and decided to blame all the Wear and Tear from the last couple years on us. Wear and Tear is not something hosts are supposed to be able to charge damage fees for, but they rung us up for a massive damages fee (thousands of USD). We refuted the charge with Airbnb, providing our video evidence which directly countered each of the host's claims.
Airbnb didn't care and made us pay. Even though we've used Airbnb many times, I guess the host was still worth more to Airbnb than us as guests. We left a review describing the experience, and the host countered with their negative review of us. The cherry on top is that we forgot to logout of all our video streaming services from their TV, and the host's last last petty move was to delete all our user profiles from all our services.
An enlightening book I read on this topic is "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" by Bjorn Lomborg.
The book explores the cost of: doing nothing to fight climate change vs doing everything to fight climate change vs doing something in the middle that optimizes global GDP (the book uses GDP as a "human welfare" metric).
My biggest take away from the book is that regardless of global temperature increases through the end of the century, global GDP is still projected to grow A TON. But because of the temperature increase, global GCP will grow _slightly_ less (like a few % less) that it otherwise would have. The wrong policies could cost GDP growth more than the temperature increase will.
Annual GDP of a country != the current sum total net worth of its population. Deleting the poorest half of the US population would destroy the annual GDP, which is built on the labor of said population. Theoretically, as the GDP of a nation grows, so does the quality of life of its population through better access to everything money can buy. It kinda doesn't matter how many billionaires there are if the rest of the population is still able to buy air conditioners, health care, sturdier houses, pay taxes, and generally afford the things that make the climate the least of their worries, as there are super diminishing returns on quality of life past a certain income level (all other arguments against billionaires are outside the scope of this comment).
Developed countries are quite well equipped (as in they're rich enough) to be able to adapt to the changing climate as needed. They can buy air conditioners, build dikes, choose not to build houses in areas prone to climate disaster, etc., all if which is insanely cheaper than attempting to reduce global temperature (though that's not an argument against any attempt to reduce global temperature). Making under-developed countries richer allows them to stop doing the "worser" things that aggravate climate change and make their populations unhealthy (like burning wood for a lot of their energy needs).
(This comment is just an elaboration on the arguments in the book I mentioned—not me being an expert.)
As @pseudobry mentions: 'the book uses GDP as a "human welfare" metric'.
I don't think anybody here (even the author of the book presumably) is suggesting that they are cause and effect, but they do appear to be correlated.
Also just because 50% have 1% of the wealth, doesn't mean they don't contribute towards the wealth of the other 50% of people holding 99% of the wealth. For example, your boss gets the majority of the profit, but they couldn't run the company by themselves.
So honest question of Rich people are 90% of the economy and climate change won’t impact them much then is a huge climate change cost really a possibility?
He's a political scientist, not a climate scientist but he seems to be working backwards from the agenda of "climate change is a liberal hoax" vs "we have a serious problem and need serious solutions to it".
I'd read it if I felt like there's valid knowledge to glean (i.e., ok, so what are the best thing to do) but not to put money in a denier's pocket.
I mostly found the book enlightening because it was a calm, rational voice amidst the constant stream of the-world-is-ending-by-fire/water/drought/heat/cold news that my tech bubble sends my way.
I didn't find anything in the book about liberal hoaxes. Rather I found the author to be diligently addressing a topic they find to be quite serious. Their argument is not against climate change (they very much acknowledge we have to address it), but against what they view to be ineffective (i.e. very costly, not gonna do much to affect temperature rise) policies.
A good portion of the book is dedicated to the author's ideas for more effective ways to deal with climate change in the long run, like pumping a lot more money into R&D, looking into nuclear more, helping developing nations shed climate-aggravating technologies faster, drafting local "adapt to the climate" policies, etc. The author is in favor of a carbon tax. Another idea explored is how making the right growth-promoting improvements in developing countries during the next 20 years could enable them to deal with climate change better over the subsequent 50 years (vs short-term growth-slowing policies that might look great during elections, but don't do much to move the needle by 2100).
I read the article you linked and found it hard to interpret it as anything other than a hit piece with an almost hysterical focus on painting the book and its author in the most negative light possible. It was quite a contrast from the book where the author makes their criticisms in the vein of "I think we can do better".
I agree that civil dialog is always preferable, but there's plenty of it out there that is polite in tone however anything but such in content. Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson come to mind.
I'll read the link I shared (again) to compare and contrast, as well as look for other reviews.
I'm in the camp that is terrified of what Climate Change has in store for us, and I want to understand it to understand what is truly scary versus what is being ginned up. While the media loves to get us excited I have to say that this time they're justified from what I know so far.
Question for the crowd: I read HN often but rarely comment, so I'm curious what I did wrong in my comment to merit the downvotes.
I was initially excited to see someone asking a question about a topic that I had _just_ read a book on (I also discussed the book for a few hours in a book group). It seemed like sharing that was a goodwill thing to do.
I'm glad I saw this, it looks like an excellent resource.
However, I can't help but feel a bit of despair while looking at it. There is so much stuff to do / know about, that it's incredibly far beyond what the average person could understand, let alone follow. Most people won't get close.
I'm capable of doing everything described (and I follow a good chunk of it), but I have hundreds of accounts. The shear effort required to thoroughly roll out these protections for just myself (let alone my less-technical-than-myself-technical-family) across a such a large digital surface area make it seem an insurmountable task.
Maybe I need is a service that can automatically audit my networks / devices / accounts and give me security health scores, give me 1-click paths to enable protections, or even auto-fix security gaps. But that sounds like dropping an enterprise security blanket on my digital life, and any system capable of taking care of this for me is another single point of failure whose compromise would be catastrophic. Convenience and security must be inversely correlated.
It's better to start late than never. You probably have only a handful of high-value accounts. Emails, hosting, domain names, utility providers, social media.
Then you can focus on anyone who has your private data. E-shops and such that store your address. Realistically those can be pretty damaging if they get breached - even if your password doesn't leak in plain text, your name and address would be up for grabs.
But think about adopting the habit of gradually building up your discipline and addressing old issues as you revisit old accounts.
