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And now for the low effort response to OPs question:

"Are cities unwilling to agree to high density for newly transit-served locations?"

Absolutely, though not the "City" per se but a large enough minority of citizens to make it exceedingly difficult. Time, and time again during the outreach phase of development there are always backlashes from citizens which make it very difficult to get ANY density built in cities. This pressures governmental officials which then result in needing project reworks to get approval, which still are not good enough for the con... (read more)

Fund Transit With Development

mecko232y22

Armchair Transit Enthusiast here! Hopefully I can share some of my understanding on the situation. In short I think you've hit most of the answer in your last paragraph.

As background for those new to the topic (which it OP seems to know most of this already), this was actually how large swaths of pre-WW1 cities were developed and that method has largely disappeared by car-centric development that we've see explode post-WW2. I'm sure there are a variety of different reasons for this but if acceptable I can put a few of them in a quick list (willing to expan... (read more)

4mecko232y

And now for the low effort response to OPs question: "Are cities unwilling to agree to high density for newly transit-served locations?" Absolutely, though not the "City" per se but a large enough minority of citizens to make it exceedingly difficult. Time, and time again during the outreach phase of development there are always backlashes from citizens which make it very difficult to get ANY density built in cities. This pressures governmental officials which then result in needing project reworks to get approval, which still are not good enough for the concerned citizens, etc etc etc, ad nauseam. All of this balloons cost and timelines. "Are the costs too unpredictable?" Kinda, but I would say its just far to more capital intensive. First land purchasing costs, which key here is that not only is it a large track of land but also large tracts that are contiguous. Then once you start needing to get planning permission of right of way from Federal, State DOTs and local officials, trying to get everyone on board can take years. Then you have to deal with the hellscape of up-zoning and getting approval/permits (see below). All the while you better hope no environmentalist decides your transit route is gonna intersect a wildlife corridor and takes up the noble lawsuit fight (okay my bias is bleeding though a little). See next for the tie together. "Are private developers too car-focused?" Yes, but I would say not because they are ignorant but rather inexperienced. Think of how much new/different expertise is needed here in the way of engineering and legal. There simply is no experience or latent knowledge even in planning, hiring, and working with experts in the respective fields. This combined with the heavy investment needed and the few data points in recent decades make this a hard sell to decision makers.

What new technology, for what institutions?

mecko232y20

For the most part I agree with your opinion of technological advancement with 2 addendums. In reality it is nuanced but in my experience there are a lot of areas of low hanging fruit limited only by the number of well informed people interested in the subject. This is modified by access to capital. To me it seems a personality trait of well informed people, that they are not as interested in searching or building capital. Secondly, the regulatory environment, I strongly believe that regulation slows down both tech building and research in general, I also t... (read more)

3bhauth2y

Yes, there's a tradeoff between putting effort into research and putting it into "hustle", and usually people specialize in doing one. But it's not like "ability to partner with someone who searches for capital" is the real bottleneck. I'd say instead that there are certain people in the position to raise capital, but they have to believe in the technology and pitch it themselves, and they need to be on the same wavelength as people like Bill Gates and the moral maze masters, and the people in those positions who can communicate with investors are more likely to be delusional than to understand technology really well. ---------------------------------------- Sure, I can explain. Water is actually rather good at absorbing heat. It has a much higher heat capacity than sodium, boiling absorbs a lot of heat if you boil it, and in a typical BWR design it boils at 285 C. Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps in C aren't meaningful - does water have -3x the boiling point of ammonia? Water does that too. It's an almost universal property of liquids. You can do natural convection cooling with water. The TerraPower Natrium design is much less safe than current reactors, and using sodium does nothing to improve safety. The sodium reduces reactivity so if the coolant boils off then reactivity increases. That's bad. The neutrons are fast so neutron lifetime is short so response time needs to be fast. That's bad. IIRC the design still involves robots moving fuel rods around during operation. That can fail. It's just a really terrible design. Bad safety, and very expensive design decisions. Supposedly in the future they plan to use a "Pascal" heavy water moderated CO2 cooled reactor, which I always considered a better approach, but I have little faith in TerraPower doing a good job on it. If you're using steam, the low-pressure steam turbines are big and have a lot of inertia compared to the low-pressure

Nothing.

mecko232y10

You certainly write with artistic and evocative language, I which is a style enjoy from time to time; however it seems it is not as well received here. I can sense from the language of this post that you seem embittered by your experience online recently or perhaps even melancholic for an earlier time? Are you confident that this hasn't clouded your thinking on the subject too much?

Correct me if I have understood you wrong, but the main idea (which I think could be more fully fleshed out) is that the internet has grown stale, boring, and will soon lose peo... (read more)

1rogersbacon2y

there is no main idea and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is nothing.

Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk

mecko233y*73

First lets constrain this conversation a bit- let's only look at the US and the likelihood of famine occurring there (as we have already been talking about it). Secondly I think we can both agree that the result this is heavily dependent on the type of strike, how may cities are actually lost and the surrounding context of the exchange (is the US and Russia/China at war), but for the sake of the conversation lets say that the US immediately won the prevailing conflict and doesn't have to concern itself with preforming or dealing additional military operati... (read more)

DirectedEvolution3y2211

I think what the two of you have identified is that the hardiness of logistics and coordination capacity seems like a key determinant of how well we'd weather a nuclear exchange. If it's robust, some combination of stores and agricultural adjustments could allow us to avoid famine. If it's weak, we might experience famine even if there's plenty of siloed food.

The results of the original paper could be taken, then, as a proxy for the "logistics failure" scenario. What limited food we can access lasts us for about a year, and our practical ability to adjust ... (read more)

Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk

mecko233y*4722

Sorry for the short response here, hopefully when I have time later I can expand on it.

Background: Read your posts, not the paper

Main Point of disagreement - Famine is not about stockpiling or even producing the requisite calories. It is about distributing the food from where it is produced (or stored) to the population centers where it is needed. With grain transport most of it is done via rail with major exchange centers and logistics hubs being cities. In a nuclear exchange this infrastructure is completely wiped out (both the human capital and the act... (read more)

6Curt_Tigges3y

Regarding distribution, there's also the potential to permanently knock out our electronics and power grid with a high-altitude detonation and resultant EMP waves: https://spectrum.ieee.org/one-atmospheric-nuclear-explosion-could-take-out-the-power-grid If you knock out the solenoids in all our vehicles as well as the power grid and other electronics, it will be very hard to move that stored food anywhere, and most people will probably starve.

4Lao Mein3y

Knocking out rail infrastructure for months doesn't seem plausible to me. Rail is made of hardened steel. Short of being inside the fireball, I don't see how it would be damaged beyond repair. Maybe rail stations can be targeted, but that's still a tiny proportion of the rail that exists in the US. Less-used tracks can be cannibalized and machine shops can probably produce short-term replacement rail to keep critical lines running. As for fossil fuels, I am unsure of how much they will be targeted, but each warhead that hits an oil rig is one that's not hitting a city. In addition, the majority of the world's fossil fuel production is outside of the US and Russia, and won't be targeted. A major concern is probably oil refineries, which are very concentrated in the US, Russia, and China, but the distillation of crude oil is actually mechanically quite simple, requiring only a heat source and a condenser - you can theoretically build one in your back yard, and people have. The main reason modern refineries are so expensive and time-consuming to build is their heavy focus on efficiency and safety. Also, there's the beating heart of American agriculture, the Mississippi River. It branches throughout the Midwest, going all the way up to the Great Lakes. The considerable majority of American people and agriculture are located within a hundred km of either it or the ocean, meaning distribution would be relatively easy, even if land transportation is heavily disabled. I am unsure about fertilizer and pesticide production, especially in the case of fertilizer export bans by other nations. I think it depends heavily on how well American natural gas production survives, but lack detailed knowledge.

Technocracy and the Space Age

mecko233y10

(The goal of this comment is simply to stimulate more conversation in an area of interest to me) I often find myself disagreeing with both self-declared SpaceX fanboys (or girls) and vehement SpaceX opposers, who I find more often than not just have varying levels of distaste for Elon Musk (some complaints here are valid I feel). To get at the root of the idea, it seems that SpaceX hasn’t accomplished a miracle for space flight more so that they succeeded in developing some (difficult but not semi-impossible) engineering designs into usable rockets before ... (read more)

2sketerpot3y

I looked into it and, yes, this looks basically correct with a caveat: it's computationally very expensive to get those first stages to land on their own at a convenient, precisely chosen location. We've been doing propulsive landings for decades with e.g. the Apollo moon landers and the Viking Mars probes, the latter of which had to be fully autonomous because of speed-of-light delays. Landing a big long rocket is a bit harder because of its somewhat unwieldy shape, but inverted pendulum control problems are definitely not a new thing. So where does it get computationally hard? There are two parts to it. The first part is computing a trajectory and a flight plan -- when you should fire up the engines, which way you should be pointing them, what the aerodynamic control surfaces should be doing -- which should get you to the desired landing location. This is a tricky optimization problem, with a bunch of annoyingly non-convex control constraints. The second hard part, and the reason you can't just precompute the flight plan on a really big computer before launching the rocket, is that you need to adjust the plan in realtime. There will inevitably be unpredictable deviations from the original plan caused by things like wind or variation in atmospheric density. If you don't compensate for them, those deviations will add up; the Curiosity Mars rover, for example, was a big improvement over its predecessors because its predicted landing zone was an ellipse that only measured 20 km by 7 km. The algorithm (PDF) that I hear SpaceX is using does require some pretty serious processing power if you're going to be recomputing your entire flight plan several times per second. A version suitable for realtime use wasn't flight-tested until the early 2010s.

The Economics of a New Energy Source

mecko233y10

An interesting question to be sure, and an inspiring vision for the future. However, I think at this is too wide of a question to generate a sufficient answer and a better start would be to read more in general about energy markets (pricing, how utilities decide pricing and assess expansion projects) and the general engineering concepts behind space solar power (SSP).

Some thoughts to generate conversation:

What is the design of the power satellite system? ie are there swarms of small ones or a few large ones

What is the power beaming design? You mention micr... (read more)

Crises Don't Need Your Software

mecko233y30

Potentially, however one must consider ones own values in this question. Personally I feel that the best case would be to resolve the conflict ASAP and to support this I would certainly accept the new Russian war (stated*) aims-that is the acquisition of Luhansk and Donetsk, if it brought hostilities to end. Also in my estimation it is entirely within reason that Ukrainian Leadership may (begrudgingly) accept this as well in a ceasefire negotiations. Thus any further damage to the Russian war effort would prolong this outcome. Again I stress this is my own... (read more)

1[comment deleted]3y

Crises Don't Need Your Software

mecko233y10

This is something I thought about as well in the early days of the war however now I would question the utility of it in steering decision-making. At this point it seems unlikely that such actions could be framed as altruistic (ofc if you simply care more about Ukraine winning than ending the war this probably isn't valid), as this would be ineffective way of convincing Russian leadership to end the war while harming everyday Russians who have no control over the situation.

3Yair Halberstadt3y

What about cyber attacks specifically aimed at the Russian war effort?

LESSWRONG
LW

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