This reminds me of questions I've pondered regarding high-frequency trading (HFT). In that case, a genuine economic output (i.e. money) is created purely from analysis of momentary gradients between valuations. It seems to be creating something from nothing. Mustn't economic value come from some real-world value, like the production of food from earth, sun, air, and water?

In the case of HFT, a possible answer is that the analysis of the gradients does produce a real thing. The analysis produces a power of leverage, which is real. It's like generating power from tidal forces. (Hmm, on second thought, tidal power is ultimately dissipating the rotational momentum of the earth. Maybe HFT is after all simply dissipating genuine value.)

But in the case of a game that produces an artificial economy, where is the real value? Isn't there some kind of economic thermodynamic law, that says you can't sustain an economic output without producing something of value? Is there some economic energy being dissipated by this game's economy?

In this case, I guess one answer could be that entertainment is a genuine first-class value in the real world, even if it consumes power and labor, and produces no (other) artifact of biological value.

In my humble opinion, the gown-up way to think about a programming problem is to consider how it will perform (scalability, bottlenecks in network/memory/storage/etc), how it will be maintained (who will have to read and understand it, including a realistic understanding that it will look completely unfamiliar to you yourself in a year), where it will have to run (portability), how much time you have to write it, how the discoveries you make along the way will affect your collaborators, whether there will be opportunities to optimize later (and how much effort is appropriate to be prepare the ground for those efforts), etc.

There are trade-offs in balancing all these issues; there's a difference between a quick one-off to assess a problem, versus a tool that may eventually see production use but only accessed by sys-admins, versus an application, versus a proof-of-concept, versus an exploration of constraints on a solution, etc.

Pick the combination of trade-offs that will let you finish in the amount of time that you have, divided by pi, because it's going to take longer than you thought. There will be emails, meetings, surprises, changes of goals, etc.

When you start coding, try to get as quickly as possible to enough of a framework that you can explore the parts of the problem that are most challenging. In other words, answer the biggest questions first.

Try to maintain the attitude that you are a well-intentioned but fallible human who is attempting to solve the problem with the mix of trade-offs selected above, who expects to make some mistakes and is willing to make adjustments to respond to them. Expect that others will also see the problem differently, as they learn along with you about the problems you uncover.

It's a lot easier when you mention that global ice volume is crashing.

It'd be a shame if sumppn was to happen to ya termastat deh, while you was streaming sumppn.

Oh, you meant bandwidth?

No, I think s/he meant that we can limit population ourselves or have a crash forced on us. There doesn't seem to be any plausible way that humans will take on limiting population themselves. Ergo, etc. Presumably, you reject the premise. So, population keeps growing until ...?

Widespread consensus offers a qualitative measure of how the issue is playing out amongst those who are well-informed. The "legitimate criticisms" about the models have somehow not persuaded them that the issue is still being pulled equally in opposite directions. The "interpretation of measurements" question is apparently not enough of a conundrum to confound the conclusion that the steady absoption of energy by the climate system can be roughly quantified, and that this is consistent with a range of observations, from melting ice to changing ocean chemistry. We're to understand that there is still some room for discussion on the matter of climate sensitivity, but it likely falls within a range that suggests the problem is extremely urgent and deadly serious.

Such a "consensus" doesn't settle the question, but it tells us that the scientific community has run out of alternative hypotheses that fit the data, or which cast significant doubt on which conclusions to draw regarding causes. It doesn't mean you are not allowed to pose a new hypothesis that fits the data.

So, your attitude is that the US should just let someone else solve the problem, and then buy the next generation of reactors, solar panels, etc, from them? Maybe we should do that with other industries, as well? After all, they take a lot of effort. Let someone else design new cell phones and computer chips. Let someone else develop new materials for insulation, energy distribution, and industrial processes. Let someone else conduct research on the terrestrial ecosystem.

The West has not reduced pollution, we have simply reduced the rate at which we are adding pollution.

1. Responding as though I meant literally causing the planet earth to cease to exist is hyperbole. A mass extinction taking major limbs of the "tree of life" is figuratively destroying the planet. Grow up. And, what do you mean by "mitigation"? You mean shoring up levees and moving out of low-lying areas? That doesn't help with the problem of collapsing economies when agricultural output starts dropping. As I undedrstand it, even the Paris scenarios for reduced emissions have a hidden assumption that we'll find a way to suck existing carbon out of the atmosphere. Or is that what you meant by mitigation -- dumping iron in the oceans, or sulphur in the atmosphere, because it's "cheaper" than making an effort to deal with the source of the problem?
2. There's "cheap" in money, and cheap in sustainability. Perhaps solar electrolysis would be the latter, for now. Seems worth it to foster some incentives to drive it towards the former, by creating a market.
3. The point of talking about hydrogen is that hydrocarbons are out. Hydrogen has some things going for it. Comparing energy density alone misses some important criteria. That's what I was getting at. If you want fission everywhere, then that would at least be another possible source of the energy for electrolysis.
4. Moving from fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels is a step forward, whether it's wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever. I agree that a cowardly retreat to fossil fuels is like saying "someone else please take over the markets of the future."

But propane requires extraction, refining, and transport, which adds to the cost. Plus, fossil fuels destroy your planet, which some consider a negative. It's at least an external cost, which a fair market would add to the price at the pump.

Meanwhile, if you generate the hydrogen electrolytically via solar or wind power, and release the oxygen byproducts into the atmosphere, the cost (after capital expenses) is low, there is zero net waste in consumption, and you might cut the transport distance considerably, or completely.

Cool, but I shouldn't have to plug in a variety of different options to see how they affect the price. What if I'm flexible on launch-date, and want to optimize for cost? What's the largest payload I can put on a short rocket in a given orbit?

Having an (R) next to your name implies something about your history, intentions, and statements, regarding sexism, climate, same-sex marriage, policing, immigration, taxation, etc. One could conceivablhy work around it by demonstrating repeatedly that one actually had attitudes about these things that weren't consistent with R policies, but it takes more than a binder full of women to achieve that. A binder fuill of women says that you made an effort to avoid merely the appearance of sexism, because you had no history that would speak for itself, and were willing to have an R next to your name, implying that you're fine with being assoicated with a group that typically has nothing other than empty gestures like binders full of women to offer, rather than an actual history. Statements like "nobody has more respect for women than I do" sound hollow until you demonstrate that it's true.

You're latching onto the word "contributed" as though it was obviously intended to mean that human activity wasn't the dominant factor. Yet the obvious premise is that human activity is the dominant factor. One would need some dramatic new information to shift the story away from humans. Looks like it's you making the fucking ridiculous claims.

There have been long periods in evolutionary history where individual species are occassionally dying out, new ones are occasionally emerging, and the ecosystem is relatively stable.

What's being suggested here is something else. The idea is that we're looking at a mass extinction event, marked by a sudden, unstable transition in the ecosystem, where major chunks of the tree of life are wiped out. There's no reason to assume that we're on the part of the tree that survives, but if some humans do come thorugh this, they will find themselves in a world where much of what we think of as "nature" is gone -- the natural world that has sustained us, and, beyond that, which has been the essense of life, the thing in mind when we speak of "life".

Yeast populations face two problems as they grow: (a) running out of sugar, (b) getting poisoned by the alcohol they generate.