In principle I suppose one could build very large walls around it to reduce heat exchange with the rest of Earth and a statite mirror (or few slowly orbiting ones) to warm it up. That would change the southern hemisphere circulation patterns somewhat, but could be arranged to not affect the overall heat balance of the rest of Earth.
This is very unlikely to happen for any number of good reasons.
Only the first point "Good and evil are objectively real" is a necessary part of moral realism. Sometimes the first half of the third ("We have an objective moral obligation to do good and not do evil") is included, but by some definitions that is included in what good and evil mean.
All the rest are assumptions that many people who believe in moral realism also happen to hold, but aren't part of moral realism itself.
Research companies work best when there's plenty of infrastructure that can supply stuff they need to do the research. Including, to mention one recent case, electricity. It also helps to be in an area where there is stable government that can protect the research site from civil or military unrest, and too much (or too unpredictable) corruption. You also want it to be a place where your researchers are happy to live while they do their research, and where you can relatively easily recruit other skilled workers.
China does meet these requirements, but it is not exactly lacking in bureaucracy so I'm not sure why it made the list. If you're doing research involving human trials of some sort, you also want to be able to communicate well with the participants so extensive knowledge of the language and culture will be very useful.
All that said, plenty of organizations do carry out research all over the world, not just in rich countries with a lot of bureaucracy.
Yes, it definitely does depend upon local conditions. For example if your grid operator uses net metering (and is reliable) then it is not worthwhile at any positive price. This statement was in regard to my disputed upstream comment "Even now at $1000/kW-hr retail it's almost cost-effective here [...]".
Batteries are primarily used for intra-day time shifting, not weekly. I agree that going completely off grid costs substantially more than being able to use your own generated power for 80-90% of usage. That's why I focused on the case where home owners remain grid-connected in my top-level comment:
With smart meters and cheaper home battery systems the incentives starts to shift toward wealthier solar enthusiasts buying batteries and selling excess power to the grid at peak times (or consuming it themselves), lowering peak demand at no additional capital or maintenance cost to the grid operators.
The only mention I made regarding completely off-grid power systems was about the counterfactual scenario of $150/kW-hr battery cost, which I have not assumed anywhere else. I didn't say that it would be marginally cost effective to go completely off grid with such battery prices, just that it would be substantially more cost-effective than buying all my power from the grid. The middle option of 80-90% reduced but not completely eliminated grid use is still cheaper than either of the two extremes, and likely to remain so for any feasible home energy storage system.
That's what I was referring to regarding $700 kW/hr. At $1000/kW-hr it's (just barely) not worth even buying batteries to shift energy from daytime generation to night consumption, while at $700/kW-hr it definitely is worthwhile. Do you need the calculation for that?
At $150/kW-hr and assuming a somewhat low 3000 cycle lifetime, such batteries would cost $0.05 per cycled kW-hr which is very much cost-effective when paired with the extremely low cost but inconveniently timed nature of solar power. It would drop the amortized cost of a complete off-grid power system for my home to half that of grid power in my area, for example.
Even now at $1000/kW-hr retail it's almost cost-effective here to buy batteries to time-shift energy from solar generation to time of consumption. At $700/kW-hr it would definitely be cost-effective to do daily load-shifting with the grid as a backup only for heavily cloudy days.
Pumped hydro is already underway in this region, though it's proving more expensive and time-consuming to build than expected. Have there been some recent advances in compressed air energy storage? The information I read 2-3 years ago did not look promising at any scale.
How do you construct a maximizer for 0.3X+0.6Y+0.1Z from three maximizers for X, Y, and Z? It certainly isn't true in general for black box optimizers, so presumably this is something specific to a certain class of neural networks.
Battery costs should be lower by now than they are.
For example, in Australia wholesale cell prices are on the order of $150/kW-hr, while installed battery systems are still more than $1000/kW-hr. The difference isn't just packaging, electrical systems, and installation costs. Packaging doesn't cost anywhere near that much, installation costs are relatively flat with capacity, and so are electrical systems (for given peak power). Yet battery system costs from almost all suppliers are almost perfectly linear with energy capacity.
I don't know why there isn't an alternative decent-quality supplier that would eat their lunch on large-capacity systems with moderate peak power. Such a thing should be still very highly profitable with a much larger market. It could be that there just hasn't been enough time for such a market to develop, or supply issues, or something else I'm missing?
It's not cheaper in reality. Net metering is effectively a major subsidy that goes away pretty much everywhere that solar generation starts to make up a significant fraction of the supply.
Electricity companies don't want to pay all that capital expense, so it makes sense for them to shift it onto consumers up until home solar generation starts approaching daytime demand. After that point, they can discontinue the net metering and push for "smart meters" that track usage by time of day and charge or pay variable amounts applicable for that particular time, and/or have separate "feed in" credits that are radically smaller per kWh than consumption charges (in practice often up to 85% less).
With smart meters and cheaper home battery systems the incentives starts to shift toward wealthier solar enthusiasts buying batteries and selling excess power to the grid at peak times (or consuming it themselves), lowering peak demand at no additional capital or maintenance cost to the grid operators.
In principle the endgame could involve no wholesale generators at all, just grid operators charging fees to net consumers and paying some nominal amount to net suppliers, but I expect it to not converge to anything as simple as that. Economies of scale will still favour larger-scale operations and local geographic and economic conditions will maintain a mixture of types and scales of generation, storage, distribution, and consumption. Regulation, contracts, and other conditions will also continue to vary greatly from place to place.
Thanks for making this!
I found it a challenge to deduce strategies over many plays, rather than following the advice "not intended to be replayed". The first playthrough was pretty much meaningless for me, especially given the knowledge that both time and history could affect the results. I just viewed it as one step of information gathering for the real game.
The suboptimal zones weren't obviously suboptimal from a single pass, even Dragon Lake that always yields nothing. For all I knew, it could have yielded 5000 food with quite a low probability (and still be always optimal), or lesser amounts of food at specific combinations of time and day, or only when matching some rule based on the previous results of foraging in other zones.
After many runs I did settle on a strategy, and mentally scored myself by looking at the source to see whether there was anything that I should have spotted but didn't. As it happened, my final strategy was almost optimal though I stayed on the rats for a few more hours than ideal.