Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
Not an expert, but from what I understood, SARS-Cov-2 infects cells through the ACE2 receptor that is present in all kinds of different cells along the blood vessels. It's "just" particularly present in the cells inside the lungs, which is why so many Covid patient could not take up enough oxygen anymore. But that somewhat nebulous "long tail" of other Covid symptoms is caused by the virus infecting other cells inside the body.
So I guess that technically makes it a vascular and not a respiratory disease.
However, the transition actually driving the change in the world currently, absent from OP, is the demographic transition and migration. It started in France in the 18th century and is now hitting much of the world with no end in sight and virtually no unaffected populations. Dwarfs covid, PVs, or oil, which was largely solved anyway by fracking.
For example, if someone is also repeating other far-right propaganda (“fracking has solved the oil problem”), what are the chances that their use of this term is in good faith rather than as a dogwhistle?
Incidentally, are you claiming one of the above posters here has already included "other far-right propaganda" that tips the scales?
From my perspective, there's been some kind of false-alarm. The danger exists out there, but--unless there's some author reputation I'm unaware of--this isn't it.
It has nothing to do with any particular ethnicity. Insofar as "immigration" comes into play, it refers to economic demand for labor as the population-bump people exit the labor pool.
It's associated with the drop in fertility, rise in life expectancy, etc.
There are now people arguing that we're undergoing the second demographic transition.
For "demographic transition"? That's not what I get, perhaps those results are customized by Google, and it has an inaccurate idea of what you're interested in? (Even if that "interest" comes from vigorously opposing something.)
I'd try opening a private/incognito window and comparing the result-pages.
When I search in a private-tab for "demographic transition" (in quotes) the first item is the Wikipedia article (the definition I expect) followed by more of basically the same thesis from other academic sites.
I think you and OP disagree on what the actual problem with oil is.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/18/molly-ivins-rai...
>After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992 Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats in terms of a “cultural war”, columnist Molly Ivins wrote that it “probably sounded better in the original German”. She did not live to cover a Donald Trump rally.
* The knowledge abut the actual size of the milkshake has increased,
* The actual size of the milkshake has not increased, a decade and more of extraction has continued to decrease that actual size,
* The cost per unit of extraction has increased,
* All extraction of fossil fuel continues to contribute to an ever increasing real and serious problem with increased insulation in the atmosphere.
Peak oil was never about "oil runing out", it was literally about increasing costs for diminishing returns .. an asymptotic issue that never ends, just dwindles.
Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission cars.
The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
What?
In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to synthetic.
Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.
But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers killed have been hundreds or few thousand since.
Yay Star Trek
Solar energy isn't a fashion statement, it's rapidly and cheaply getting energy to billions of people who need it the most.
[1]https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...
Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.
The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.
So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.
These are huge globe changing effects being batted around. Solar is going to have an enormous effect - it’s distributed at minimum. A lot of human domestic activity (billions of people) can go off grid. That’s going to chnage politics in ways that’s hard to understand
Elite production (a term I always have concerns about - I prefer to say that the average school leaving age has moved from 16 when I was young to 21.)
But elites, social media, balkanisation of social groupings (death of mass media) these also have huge effects.
But the good news is this page on HN probably lists all of the giant freaking tidal waves - it’s not an infinite challenge. But it is going to need radically different approaches to fix it.
Luckily we have Democracy and Science - tattoo them on your knuckles folks - we got a fight ahead of us :-)
At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better
Stross (the author of Accelerando) thinks the world of Accelerando is exactly the opposite. A bleak terrible world full of horrors where the overwhelming majority of humans have been killed or worse. It is only because the book is written from the perspective of the few survivors that "made it" that it seems more cheery.
See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...
Choice quotes from the main article and comments:
> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism [sic] eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. > > The logic of exponential progress at a tempo rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it for humanity.
and
>> [Reader question] I didn't read it that way at all. Are insects extinct? Bacteria? Or even Horseshoe crabs? > > Yup, pretty much. By chapter 8 of "Accelerando", Earth has been destroyed -- broken up to make computronium or other stuff of interest to the Vile Offspring. Those humans who didn't get off the planet or upload their minds ("Accelerando" takes a rather naively can-do approach to uploading) are dead. Ditto the biosphere.
Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author
In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.
The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].
Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].
The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ [3] https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.
The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.
If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.
He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...
His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.
If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.
There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
This appears to be you saying "look what they made me do".
If it isn't, you should clarify your point.
They correctly noted that many people feel left behind by globalization, whereas those in the professional managerial class don't feel as threatened. Liberals have long been fretting about the viability of multiculturalism since the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, and before. And the particular rise of aggressive identity politics has put the public image of left-wing people in the trash, as they are now associated with speech police and people obsessed with identity issues in ways that are often tinged with hate or which aren't related to the material interests of anyone.
All of this has been said ad nauseam in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The New Republic, WaPo, NYT, and even NPR... all of which could be fairly criticized as epicenters of the very problem they have also critiqued.
Pretending like pointing out any of this a problem is a succinct demonstration of why the Right keeps winning.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/19/677346260/warning-to-democrat...
Oh right so the rise of the far-right can't be summed up as the fight for resources and people trying to capitalize on their citizenship status, it' because of those people that make you angry then let's call it a boomer (boooh you're old) and call him a day.
You are insulting my intelligence. It was fine to live around foreigners before billionaire owned medias started drilling down the message that it was awful to live around those people
Written from my very small mansion with a high rent in a sea of multiculturalism that is to be fair the least of my problems. I want clean air, good public transportation and a walkable neighborhood. I also want quality affordable food, quality housing and cheap energy. Yes safety matters but guess what, people don't generally have guns on them and there is some welfare here so it's totally fine
I am sorry about the downfall of your white carbrain suburbian paradise but to be fair, I grew up in one and it wasn't that great nor sustainable
I am also sorry for this emotionally loaded not-hn-worthy comment but hey, you started this by trying to smuggle culture war elements in your comment. I just hope your comment will be dead before mine is.
One of his favorite subjects is Brexit. I'm not a fan either, but here's his track record:
2016: When the Brexit vote happened, he predicted imminent Scottish independence, a failure of the Northern Ireland peace, and the collapse of the London financial sector (note the "fascism is here!" Cabaret reference): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorro...
2018: he's stockpiling food and medicine to prepare for the immediate consequences of Brexit's implementation: "Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well... After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979, when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to get that bad. But then the situation will continue to deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...
2020: impending crisis, widespread shortages, deployment of the military, "added economic crisis, probable civil disobedience and unrest, a risk of the NHS collapsing, a possible run on Sterling, and then a constitutional crisis as one or more parts of the United Kingdom gear up for a secession campaign." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
2021: yet more disaster predictions, including that Boris Johnson might declare war on France: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/11/an-upda...
In 2022 he once again predicted a general strike, a failed harvest, and the collapse of the UK system of government: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/08/the-gat...
And then... none of this happened. Brexit hasn't exactly been positive for the UK, but neither has it rendered it into Fallout: London.
They were predicting Mad Max, and they still call the Brexiteers dumb.
That being said, the UK had an good deal in the EU, access to the markets without having to accept the dumb currency. which is why the EU played so rough with them, and is generally better off for them having left.
The problem is that the UK being between France and Germany, maybe because English is an unholy combination of French and German, was a stabilizing influence. When Europe finally faces the fact that they're no match for Russia and should just leave it alone, there will be nothing left but to turn on each other again. I suppose the winner can invade Russia again and lose, again.
But the fantasy that this stupid trade union meant that much was a collective elite hysteria. They couldn't just admit that they just liked to be able to travel and work in Europe like they were at home, because they knew most people couldn't actually afford to do that. Also, they loved the cheap labor, and that's another embarrassing thing to say out loud.
I don't see that at all. The EU was a Franco-German project. De Gaul kept the British out as long as he could because he thought they'd be destabilising, and he was correct.
The UK was always a bit of an odd man out in the EU in that for them it was always "The EU is doing this or that" whether good or bad. For the central European countries it's "We are doing this or that" because they ARE the EU. If only the UK could have seen themselves as part of it. Your comment follows a similar vein, they're not going to turn on each other so easily. Not yet. The European project means far too much to the French and Germans, far more than it ever did the the British.
I'm ex-pat British, I've lived in Europe, although I now live elsewhere. I personally think brexit was a bad move, but I don't really believe it had much to do with the EU anyway. It's discontent because things aren't working well for a lot of people at the moment, and nobody in politics is offering a path to anything better.
From a Bank of England study:
> People living in left-behind areas were more likely to support Brexit than those living in prosperous areas. The gains of Brexit were perceived to be greater in areas of the country that had experienced economic decline. But within those areas, given people's preferences, we show that wealthier individuals were more likely to vote for Brexit, and poorer individuals were more likely to vote for Remain.
ref. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/study-finds-wealthy-more-likely-t...
> One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that small UK firms appear to be more adversely affected than larger ones. > > They have been less able to cope with the new post-Brexit cross-border bureaucracy. That's supported by surveys of small firms.
ref. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrynjz1glpo
All this is not hard to reason yourself out of. The wealthy can afford to go to Europe regardless of whether UK remains integrated with the EU. They are the least affected by decision either way. The less well-to-do have significant costs imposed now that the integration is over - both monetary and bureaucratic whenever they want to deal with the EU. This is despite the free trade deal.
These days the internet news junkies are writing those letters.
Many thanks!
I started reading the Laundry Files, and was shocked by how diverse his knowledge is, and how well he understands some aspects of the world (bureaucracy, the nature of horror writing, state intelligence apparatuses).
He seems to be far more intelligent and knowledgeable than the average human. So why the incredible lack of self-awareness when it comes to predicting the end of the world?
> I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline, and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who benefited from it.
Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an ice age - it used to be hotter most of its history.
How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis?
It’s one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from freezing to normal temperature) too fast, but saying that it will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060 https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rai...
And the planet may well have been warmer in the past, but the ecosystems had millions of years to adapt to it.
Also, your geological timelines are way off. Last interglacial period (with temperatures higher than today) was 100k years ago.
HN has literally became an anti-intellectual echo-chamber.
I noticed world peace wasn't on the roadmap. After we solve 3 or 4 of these existential crises, do we still have time for that, or are we pushing it to 2100?
I'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China is going to change things radically. Human labor will not be an economic constraint, but that won't lead to unlimited abundance because the constraint will be externalities.
Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will improve because AI is better than they are naturally at everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially if AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in the interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to solve trolley problems.
This is a tangent but i personally dream of the EU doing a university led effort to make a benign AI. Because it is the last crumbling bastion of liberal democracy.
Just framing your question against a backdrop of "human benevolence", as well as implying this is a single dimension (that it's just a scalar value that could be higher or lower), is already too biased. You assume that logic which applies to humans, can be extrapolated to AI. There is not much basis for this assumption, in much the same way that there is not much basis to assume an alien sentient gas cloud from Andromeda would operate on the same morals or concept of benevolence as us.
Just like parents in rich countries don't constantly have to decide which of their kids should go hungry: they make sure ahead of time to buy enough food to feed every family member.
I also believe that as soon as someone boots up an AI that is kind, they'll kill it immediately, for the reason of it being kind, favoring instead the dumb AI that can follow orders.
I generally sum it up as "ai doesn't have the human spirit" and ergo it will not have a moral compass
If you are mainly constrained by externalities of production / industrialisation one way to maximise the resources available to you is to have fewer other people.
You misunderstand what the elites do. They prevent change because the status quo has been setup by their parents and grand-parents to benefit them at the expense of everyone else already.
They are not agents of change, they are agents of preventing change.
Peasants are not very productive and you need a lot of them, and you're continually running the risk that they're going to revolt or want a better deal.
Under conditions of wider stability I absolutely agree with you that in general "elites" want to slow or block change. The system is rigged to support them already and change is risky. When there is significant external competition (threat of war or impending social change that would overturn their control), I believe it turns out to be surprising what can be done...
If automation can replace labour as the main productive input, the "masses" and welfare seem largely redundant and significant degrowth might be seen as preferable.
I am not claiming this is pre-ordained or a definite outcome, I am saying that this line of reasoning seems plausible to me.
The tipping point would seem to be where the marginal return on investment in capital (automation, AI, machines) exceeds the marginal return on investment in humans (labor, welfare, training, etc.).
I know you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who tell you “yes, yes, speak truth to power!” and shit like that but this is just an angry blogpost.
Take it easy. Just take a 2 week break from social media. Read a book from the before times and don’t go on the Internet. Come back and see if you care.
First off, the pink elephant in the room: a PV panel is not an energy plan. A PV panel is a cheap way to generate electricity, yes. But there are many, many, many other things you need to take that PV panel and make it a sustainable source of energy on a national scale. Here's a short list: 1) a continuous production source of cheap panels, 2) a continuous demand of cheap panels (supply-demand being one of the reasons they're so cheap, but they also last 12+ years, so there is a built-in economic time-bomb when demand drops off), 3) residential and commercial equipment and processes to send the PV energy to the grid, 4) a grid that can handle it all, 5) enough batteries to store it both overnight and on cloudy days, 6) a cheap source of plentiful batteries (and again the same supply-demand issue), 7) space for the panels, and (though nobody thought this would be an issue, but apparently it is) 8) the political interest in investing in (and not intentionally tanking) the renewable sector. Each of these is a big enough deal that if they don't work out just right, there goes your PV energy plan.
We don't get a more advanced society just because it's possible; someone needs to make a profit off it first. Ideas like "B2B" and "V2G" charging, electric trucking, etc are still a pipe dream because they aren't significantly commercially viable. If it's expensive, doesn't net you an immediate return, and is risky in general, nobody does it. Let's use a very well established example: Trains. Extremely cost effective for transportation, but you'd have to be insane to build or upgrade existing track.
Anyone thinking the world is gonna get off oil or coal isn't aware that USA, the EU, and China, are not the only countries/regions on the globe. There are 6 billion other people on the planet. The vast majority of them are poor and live in poor countries. They can't even afford fucking vaccines, and you think they're all going to develop cutting-edge energy generation and distribution systems? It would take at least 50 years for most developing nations to match developed western nations.
Not only will developing countries stick to oil and coal, the US will certainly see a return to it too. Remember that there is still 3 more years for Trump to find new ways to destroy the renewables sector in the US and alienate us from foreign renewables. Texas benefits from the country being dependent on oil, not panels. Whatever feeds the political monkey wins. And from a national security perspective, it would be impossible to replace our military's vehicles with EV alternatives in any reasonable time frame, so we continue to be dependent on oil for defense. If the military needs it, then we keep making and using it. In many ways, oil (that we can continue to extract in our own borders) is a far more secure energy source than ones that depend on rare materials we might not have in abundance here.
We are not facing an agro threat. We have far more agricultural resources than is needed to feed all our people, even with higher temperatures and less water. We would simply grow fewer livestock and switch from corn to actually nutritional food. Even just tripling the amount of oats we produce (a tiny amount) would provide most of the nutrition we need. We aren't dependent on foreign countries for ag; we just like the cheap prices. And this is without talking about bioengineered crops or using more northern land for farming. (our country is fucking huge) Other countries will definitely be at risk due to climate change, but we are still rich enough and have enough resources to get along just fine. Everything will be more expensive, and people won't be happy, but we won't even remotely starve.
I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo, corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility. "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly appreciated line.
(†) – Vaclav Smil's work comes to mind.
Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, and malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable.
This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use.
Quibble: China's solar panels are not thin-film.
TMWNN•8h ago
What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
Bjartr•8h ago
unholyguy001•7h ago
Unearned5161•5h ago
MichaelNolan•3h ago
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2024
ryoshu•6h ago