I think the Athenians named our current system an oligarchy. Selection by lot would take a lot of the corrupting influence of money out of the system too. There would need to be safeguards though, similar to how juries are protected during a trial.
I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.
they didn't just happen, they were expected and demanded. there was social pressure to have children. that's still true in china today. some not yet grandparents put a lot of pressure on their children to give them grandchildren (sometimes very violently too), and i remember a comment in an earlier thread where someone told about the experience of their parents or grandparents where the local pastor was having a concerned talk with a childless couple.
Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
Several Chinese manufacturers are doing just that, and have already expanded production: https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c... But because of tech trade barriers their primary focus is on the domestic market and only secondarily global markets.
Well, that's the thing about a bubble: it can be very possible to accurately tell it's a bubble—and the definition of a bubble is that it's going to pop—without being able to tell just when it will pop.
And given how much of stock prices these days is purely dependent on stock traders believing they'll be able to sell those stocks on to some Greater Fool later, rather than based on the reality of the company the stock is about...well, they can keep the ball in the air for quite a while.
Personally, I suspect that the primary trigger for the big selloff is going to be the upcoming IPOs. Bigwigs get their big bucks, cash out, and leave everyone else holding the bag.
But if any of us knew when events like those were going to happen, we'd probably be rich from that already, hm?
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has warned Samsung and SK Hynix they could face 100% tariffs, framing it as a choice between paying a 100% tariff or building memory fabs in America...
Do tariff threats still matter? After being struck down, I thought the only new tariffs which could happen would have to be enacted by Congress? Or world that be a fun game where the new illegal tariffs would be on the books until the courts invalidate them again?
The administration is trying every single angle they can to make congress-less tariffs stick. The latest is slapping a bunch of countries with 10% because they claim those countries insufficiently prevent goods produced by slaves from being imported which makes it unfair for producers in the U.S.
Might be true but it’s hard to take that argument in good faith at this point.
The bottleneck isn't the sticks, it's the chips. The chips are the same for consumer and server applications. What's been happening is that big companies have bought nearly all the wafer capacity for the next year or so, and perhaps some of that capacity has also been redirected from DDR5 to LPDDR5. If a stick manufacturer drops out of the consumer market that kinda doesn't matter, because manufacturing sticks is relatively low tech compared to manufacturing the memory chips. You can compare it to manufacturing video cards vs. manufacturing GPUs (as in the actual processing elements).
Theoretically if you can build more capacity you can take customers from your competitors. If you don't really have competitors that doesn't work so well.
Government needs to get out of the way. Micron announced a memory fab in Syracuse in 2023. It took 3 years, 20,000 pages of "environmental review", deals with the government on amount of union contracts during building, etc. for them to break ground in 2026 for a 2030 opening date. In any reasonable world, a 2023 announcement should have broke ground in 2023.
OTOH, a celulose factory near me, built in the 1950's, got their permits fast and with little regard to environment. FF three decades, and their entire surroundings are destoyed for everyone else. Trials go nowhere, because they have all authorizations needed (and a lot of political leverage because they are the main employer in the region). Careful fast-tracking business that have zero incentives to avoid externalization of costs.
The main blocker was that there were bats there so they needed to buy separate land to preserve. 20k pages of environmental review is just make work to spend money and create an unnecessary paper trail. If polluting with x is illegal then its illegal. The review doesnt stop that.
And? The primary goal should be to catch and stop pollution, not make manufacturers spend years promising not to do something they're not allowed to do. If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
The process is there because Industry has proven that it can't be trusted.
The only way to stop it is to verify that it won't happen in the first place by making sure their building plans are up to par. The song-and-dance, well even with the review, they try their damn hardest to cut corners and hood-wig wherever they can.
> If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
First of all I disagree that it's difficult to get injunctions to stop an activity that was illegal from the start. In fact, sometimes environmental reviews can backfire because they typically require affirmation by the government, which can create a defense to doing something that would otherwise be judged illegal. That type of loophole is why people are so cynical.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
Sure, but in terms of expenditure and especially time (and time is a huge expense because of the cost of raising and securing financing) that work doesn't make up the bulk of the cost. There's nothing wrong with impact statements themselves. You need independent assessments of hazards beyond the well known ones like chemical storage, where in most cases existing codes and regulations are more than adequate. It's that in many places, California especially, there's no fixed goal post. The review process has effectively become a vehicle for local and even national politics to play out. And a method for detractors to spread FUD (again especially in California where anyone, not just officials or local residents, can challenge and drag out review of an impact statement itself, let alone proposed mitigations). Just look at what has happened with CaHSR (they're still not completely done getting write-off on all the necessary impact statements for the planned route) or the politics involved with approving offshore wind farms, where Trump and, to a lesser extent, the Biden administration showed how much pure politics plays into things and drives costs up. (And federal EIP review process is, at least historically, much simpler and less subject to political games compared to some state analogs.)
The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).
It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.
Environmental review is just part of the permitting by state and local authorities. you could completely get rid of it and still not get your permits.
I agree with many of your points but you are railing against the wrong culprit.
I wonder if this creates opportunity for spinning up competitors to these PE owned companies. If they are underinvesting in their products in order to extract value eventually their offerings will not be competitive.
I think in theory it does, but in practice the customers of PE-bought companies don't update their priors fast enough.
If a company being purchased by PE meant that they lost the vast majority of their customers as soon as contractually possible, then the possible value extracted by PE would drop off a cliff.
This isn't necessarily the fault of the customers - we're all dealing with a lot of information to process.
And, up until recently, it was reasonable to attach reputation to brand instead of to owners.
And I think that's a lot of what PE exploits - the gap between people's belief about a brand's reliability/reputation, and the fact that the actual reliability has been a function of who the actual owners of the company are for many years - but people are still attached to the old mental model.
(there may also be some value for PE to extract from assets aside from customer relationships and the higher-order "brand value", but I suspect that that's secondary - if I'm wrong please correct me)
If you read the article it provides a good example. Fire truck businesses with a 4 year backlog and high margins. This is less competitive than the situation prior to PE consolidating it when it had much lower backlog and ~3% margins. Seems like a clear market opportunity.
Ah, okay. Sorry, I misread what you had said. I missed the “owned”, and thought you were saying the PE companies themselves would be uncompetitive—and wasn’t sure what you meant.
The issue with Venus and Mars is that there is no magnetosphere. Over geological time periods the hydrogen is slowly lost into space. All that CO2 in the atmosphere could become H20 given enough introduced hydrogen, and photosynthesis.
Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).
Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.
Venus has a lot of atmosphere but very little water, maybe 1/1,000,000 as much in the atmosphere as we have in the atmosphere + ocean.
If you are interested in hyperlarge structures you could maybe spread out a really big foil to catch hydrogen from the solar wind and react it with oxygen in one form or another to make a large ocean.
That induced hydrogen, which you're looking for, can very well be the material particles in the solar wind. They don't reach much the Earth because are mostly charged protons and thus collide with Earth's magnetosphere. However, the lack of a strong magnetosphere on Venus means that, once that carbon dioxide layer gets reduced to lower levels and the reactive (free) oxygen can stay below a certain altitude, that shower of hydrogen should naturally become water. Therefore, the key to water on Venus is the reduction of carbon dioxide levels and production of free oxygen.
My understanding is, insofar as we're talking about protection from radiation, Venus compensates for its lack of a magnetosphere with incredibly thick atmospheric cover that does the same work, in fact does it better than here on Earth. That's not to say we would say no to a magnetosphere if such a thing could ever be achievable.
There's a degree of induced magnetosphere on Venus. Coupled with the atmosphere, you're far more shielded from radiation even floating high up in the Venusian atmosphere than on Mars.
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
Yeah, concentrating CO2 from atmospheric concentrations is not easy. The benefit is that it actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. Whether it can ever be done on a large scale is a question, though.
Is there any work on doing that, at a low energy cost? (I mean concentrating CO2, not removing it by weathering rocks?)
Yeah, ships are not really weight constrained, unlike airplanes, really cheap sodium batteries should be feasible.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
I think that's why people gravitate towards friendly dogs. Dogs have no deception in their intent, and they communicate it physically well before you reach them.
Animals in general are much more honest than people. They might sometimes engage in minor deceptions (although I sometimes wonder how much of that is projection based on our perceptions of their intentions), but they always make it clear where you stand with them. An animal will never pretend to like you to your face if they actually don't. Obviously it can be useful for humans to be able to deceive like this (e.g. maintaining cordial professional relationships with coworkers who you might never choose to spend time with if you didn't work with them), but as someone who struggles to read social cues and gain confidence about what people actually think of me, it can get exhausting.
I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.
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