We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.

Yep.

Even without the ownership issue it would almost certainly have failed because TSG (to distinguish them from SCO) discovered to their shock and amazement that Linux had not, in fact, kifed code from Unix. They clearly went into it assuming that a bunch of volunteer hackers couldn't possibly have built a fully-functional kernel, expecting they could easily prove lots of copyright infringement. Failing to find infringement they hoped they could bluster IBM into settling, but IBM was determined to fight it out and had much better lawyers (heh, we used to call them the Nazgul).

Many of us were disappointed when the ownership issue was revealed. We really wanted Linux to get its day in court. As it turned out that didn't matter; no one else was ever dumb enough to try. Today, of course, the biggest tech companies in the world -- which means the biggest companies in the world! -- almost all use Linux extensively. Even Microsoft would probably stand up to defend Linux these days.

TLDR: Agreed, if it is taken directly. But indirectly the strategic leaders must take the broader population into account ... and therefore the economy. People who do not behave strategically are very unlikely to become leaders. Therefore decision-makers not taking broader economy of a war into account are very unlikely.

Leaders in democracies are quite limited by laws and parliaments. They cannot go to war only on their own whim. Quite a lot of persons need to be on-board i.e. agree that the war has sense for them as well ... which typically means it has an economic sense. The more people are involved the more it is about overall economy. One leader is very unlikely to prevail if it looks like the war significantly harms the broader population.

As for as dictatorships, dictators have more decision power themselves. But they still need to keep their key supporters happy (at least the lead of internal state security, the lead of internal revenue and the lead of army). And these key supporters need to keep their supporters happy too (i.e. take opinions of more people into account). Anyway, if the dictator can think strategically then he will consider the overall economic consequences. Otherwise the war only hastens his demise. And their long term outlook is not very good anyway. About 20% of dictators are imprisoned or killed.

The point is that it is unlikely a dictator cannot think strategically. If he wants to survive then he must. And since he survived so far then he very likely does think strategically. It is a brutal long term fight to become a dictator.
If it looks to us that a leader went to a stupid war then it very likely only means the leader had bad information about the military power of his country or the military power of the opponent. And as we already know ... a war is a sure way to resolve these information errors.
The leader's key supporters either had bad information too or they plotted for leader's demise.
The war likely does not mean that the leader did not consider the economy of the war. He just made a honest mistake. Shit happens. More likely in dictatorship than in a democracy since more people are involved in a democracy.

E.g. one could think that Putin did not take economy of the war with Ukraine into account and that he behaved irrationally (e.g. on some nonsense like Russian World political concept). I do not think it is true. He just believed that the war will be successful and cheap. He likely believed it will take only a few weeks and Ukraine will give up and become a satellite state of Russia like Belarus is. He likely believed Europe and USA will not do anything significant as they did not do after Crimea. The broad Russian population definitely thought it will be an easy win for Russia. Even western intelligence though so. It was overwhelmingly popular at its start in Russia. Russians believed they can extract enough benefits from Ukraine to bear the small costs of the "special military operation". We do not know the numbers but currently it does not look like the war was a good idea - even if Russia prevails at the end.

The Democrats also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the PATRIOT ACT.

I take it you're in favor of reparations, then.

If not, you have an inconsistency in your worldview. You apparently believe that guilt is carried by groups across generations, even when none of the current group was alive -- and many didn't even have ancestors involved -- when the bad things were done. Thus, the modern Democrats are stained by the racism and pro-slavery views of the 19th and early 20th-century Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are therefore permanently stained by slavery.

Yes, I think it is likely.

Yes, overall for all of us together, war is always worse than negotiated settlement about the division of resources over which the disagreement is. That is not an issue. It was so in the past, it is so now and it always will be so in the future as well. The reason for that is very simple: the war is costly (it damages economic resources). This cost does not need to be incurred if a negotiated settlement happens instead of a war. I think everybody agrees with that. It is kind of obvious.

But I disagree with your second claim. War may not be better (when compared to the situation before the war) even for the side which does win. The war losses may be higher than any gains the winning side will be able to extract after winning the war. Of course, this knowledge of the extreme war cost was very likely not available to the opponents at the time the war started. Otherwise they would be very strongly encouraged to a negotiated settlement instead of a war. From one point of view, a war is a VERY COSTLY way to find out the truth about the power of the opponents. It is a search for information :-/

Anyway, my point was that on average, the cost of a war (when proportionally compared to what can be extracted after winning the war) is higher as economy is more advanced (i.e. the economy requires more educated population, more trade and more capital).

But very little material capital was required for production and people had plenty of kids. Eliminating some of them to scare the rest to compliance with the new upper class was likely an economical decision. Almost no education was required for productivity. Kids could economically contribute to society somewhere from the age of 10. No or almost no education was needed. In a way people were a relatively cheap renewable resource back then.

Also an important factor is that the work was much less sophisticated. That allowed to easily check productivity of the subjugated population and the population could be used for production. Nowadays most of the economic value comes from employment occupations which are not easily checked for productivity (e.g. research, entertainment, ...). It is much harder to economically use unsatisfied subjugated population. That increases the cost of war when compared to simple (international) trading which got cheaper due to cheap transport. Especially the blue see transport which hardly even existed back then compared to nowadays. The war cost is multiplied by the material capital necessity. Most of the productivity gains we get is from this capital. And it is very easily destroyed in wars. Just for an extreme example look at a semiconductor company. Just price for this material capital is around 40 B. But you can completely destroy it with one glide bomb for about 40 k. Hell you can destroy it with a bunch of hooligans armed with hammers!

If the book analyzes economics of war at all and if it concluded that wars were more expensive in the past than today then I think the book is wrong.

But otherwise I agree that there is less wars nowadays ... and also less crime. I just do not think that it is necessarily because people are better to each other in their core. It is most likely only a simple economic decision.

Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.

Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.

Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.

Yes, it is

When the norms and the expectations move from considering something cruelty to be funny or enjoyable to merely accepted and then to shameful or hidden -- and even illegal -- those steps are progress.

Related: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." While the individual hypocrite may not be better than the person who engages in open vice, and might be worse, the fact that people feel the need to keep their vices secret is a positive indication about society as a whole. Assuming, of course, that the "vice" is actually bad.

That's another area where our society has been improved... we're more tolerant, having realized that many things we considered bad are merely different. We still have progress to make on that front, too, but don't let perfect be the enemy of progress.

That's probably true of many, and it couples well with motivated-disbelief. Confidence that if it happens it won't really be a problem for you makes it easier to just shrug the whole thing off and refuse to think too much about whether your disbelief makes sense.

It's worth mentioning that there's one more position that actually does make sense, even if it's a bit Pollyanna-ish: The belief that science will find a less impactful way to address the problem in the future. The argument is that we shouldn't trouble ourselves now, we should just wait for the new tech that will fix it.

I actually subscribe to a weak form of this view. I think we should be acting now to address climate change, but that we shouldn't do anything too drastic, because technology is going to improve and find better solutions. The world is actually making significant strides toward emissions reduction, mostly in the form of low-emissions electricity production, and not because of a moral obligation but because renewables are cheap! That's the sort of thing that generates real progress, without much pain.

I suspect that atmospheric carbon recapture will always be extremely energy-intensive, but we are on a path to extreme but intermittent energy abundance, and carbon recapture sounds like a great way to spend the extra terawatts when they're available. I think one of the things we're not doing enough of now is research into carbon recapture and sequestration. Reducing emissions can never get us to net-negative CO2, and we need that if we want to actually fix this problem in anything less than a millennium, so cutting emissions is insufficient. The corollary to that is that cutting emissions will likely become unnecessary before we get very close to zero.

So, the conclusion of the weak-form of this techno-optimisim is that we should be working to curb emissions, and we should be directing tax dollars to recapture and sequestration research (and geoengineering, too), but we shouldn't go so far that we reduce economic output.

What I'd really like to see us do is to take a very market-driven approach, facilitated by carbon taxes. Pick a reasonable per-ton price and apply it at the point of extraction, where it's easy to identify and track, so that every downstream use has the carbon tax built in. Fossil fuel consumption that doesn't burn it and release the CO2 can apply for a rebate to recover the carbon taxes on the carbon they didn't emit. Couple that with carbon tariffs which attempt to impute to foreign-made goods the CO2 emitted in their production. Anyone who can prove they're capturing and permanently sequestering tons of carbon should be able to capture that as a refundable tax credit. Planting trees should count, as long as there's a plan to keep that carbon sequestered for several hundred years -- and if the trees burn, the tax liability comes back. Oh, and a small percentage of the tax revenue should be earmarked for climate mitigation research. The rest can just go into the general fund, ideally displacing other taxes, and maybe funding progressive offsets since a carbon tax would be mildly regressive.

There'd be a fair amount of bureaucracy in defining and administering such a tax, especially the tariff part. But it's manageable, I think, in particular because it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough that everyone is incentivized to avoid 1-2% of their emissions this year, another 1-2% next year, and so on, and good enough that there's actual money to be made in recapture and sequestration for anyone who can figure it out. With that, we can sit back and let the market solve the sort of problem it's good at solving. We might need to tune the carbon tax rates a bit from time to time, and we'll want to scrutinize the system regularly to identify loopholes to close, but mostly we could just consider it a solution in progress.

Wars are much more costly now that they were in the past. Wars destroy (material/human) capital a lot and that leads to huge productivity drops. So it is logical that we do less wars and we would do so even if we were perfectly selfish and psychopathic.
Even common people do less crime likely because law enforcement is better and we live well enough even without crime ... so why to risk doing crime.
Maybe animal cruelty is down primarily because we have much better fun activities like sports, movies, gaming ...