It's probably never been the case that plurality of views meant anything since online is a bubble to begin with, filtered by endless biases wherever we happen to be reading, making it an even more fringe bubble, but the advent of AI has pushed it all over the edge to the point that perceived pluralities are just completely and utterly meaningless. Somewhat depressing for a one who enjoys online chat as a pasttime, but it's the reality of the world now.

What's a good way to think about this? Because it does cross my mind about the billions of dollars at play - at the same time, I'm not a pessimist. I think my middle ground is kind of just the usual, taking things with a grain of salt. I mean, I chose to reply to this comment in good faith it's human to human, commenter to unpaid/unaffiliated commenter.

I hope I keep that faith. I hope our billions of neighbors on the web enable me to keep that faith over the coming years. Definitely uncertain about the future of the web but want to love it like I've loved it 1990s-today. (Guess I should volunteer w/the EFF while job hunting, try for for-purpose jobs...)

I believe the rule around here is to not assume everyone who disagrees with you or has opinions you don’t understand is a shill. Perhaps there’s a bit of that in the post you replied to, but to me seems mostly about mourning the loss of quality conversations online.

Gotta say, I agree. Not that things were ever great, but it’s really in the crapper now.

And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.

The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.

BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.

Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.

It emphasizes neither!

What you've described is a mass grave.

Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!

Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.

This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)

For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.

Now this actually says something about size of the earth!

If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)

Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!

If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.

Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.

I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.

I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".

Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.

This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.

> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...

Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.

Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.

Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.

Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.

Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.

Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.

I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land. The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.

Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.

Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.

And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.

Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)

No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:

"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"

You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.

And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all. I completely agree it'll run out eventually, possibly within our lifetimes. It's unlikely to lead to anything particularly catastrophic as once reserves do start declining (keep in mind proven reserves have been increasing faster than production for decades), the price of oil will steadily rise, and it'll create some solid economic incentives to comfortably transition to other energy sources.

If it was a lower purity, then when they sold the 129 tons, they would not have obtained 129 tons of "higher purity" gold and still turned a profit. They would have gotten fewer tons of gold. Your logic has the wrong sign.

Also, the fact that gold prices are rising means when France sold the gold and then purchased it later, the higher price to obtain the same quantity of gold would mean they incurred a loss, not a profit. Here, too, your sign is wrong.

Finally, at current prices, 129 tons of gold is worth $19 Billion dollars in total. It seems hard to believe that short term price declines (which is what is needed to turn a profit) would be such that gold fell over 80% in value, which is what would be needed to sell 129 tons of gold, then wait a while and buy 129 tons of gold, and end up with a profit equal to over 80% of the price of gold in question.

Moreover, rising gold prices would cause the French to earn a loss, not a profit

Seems counterintuitive to me. This would only make gains when they bought the new gold before selling the old, or when there's some arbitrage going on between Gold/USD, Gold/EUR and USD/EUR.

If they first sold the old for USD, then bought the new for USD, with a rising gold price, they'd miss the price-gain during the time between the trades, when they held the USD. It'd be a loss, not a gain.

If there's some arbitrage going on, then I highly doubt that brings $15B gain. The differences would have to be huge.

I think the (author (AI)) writing that article is simply mixing up stuff. I think this gain is not a cause-effect of the conversion, merely the gains from rising gold prices on the gold it holds over that period.

Nah it's just regular realized gain (delta between acquisition price and selling price).

https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...

(so it's kinda irrelevant, it's just they have to put it in their books)

Different gold, and two financial transactions, accounts for the financial gain.

a) they bought the gold long time ago for basically nothing and had it on their books valued at basically nothing

b) they sold it now (in the US) for around $15b and thus for accounting purposes realised a $15b gain

c) they bought it back (in France) for around $15b and will have it on the book now valued at $15b.

The fact that the gold price rose over the course of b) selling and c) buying doesn't matter (despite what the article implies). That the gold price rose between a) the original purchase and now b)c), that's what resulted in the profit.

This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?

In reality the article is attempting to account for a capital gain pnl accounting for taxes.

They have ~same amount of gold between both years and it doesn't look like they took extra market risk.

People always exaggerate the impact of geopolitical things, because it feels like the biggest thing ever, especially when you're relatively young. But in reality we're always onto nonsense after nonsense. Countries have the wisdom and view to appreciate this, and so respond to geopolitical stuff (in action, not rhetoric) far more gradually than people do. They're certainly not going to just dump all their dollar reserves because of a single misguided war or even misguided president, or they'd have been gone long ago.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency#Global_curren...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...

[2] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Don't take my word for it. Listen to Mark Carney at Davos.

This is the main reason that things are different. Most presidents were reasonable in their hegemony, and Trump's naked aggression makes everyone to hedge against US.

And as you go back you can see that our more contemporary actions are just echoes of the past anyhow. Vietnam was also started on a complete and malicious lie. [1] That lie then led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, practically bankrupted the country (playing a major role in the events of 1971), left the country more divided than ever, and concluded with us running away from Vietnam with our tail tucked.

We didn't start the fire. It just always feels so different in the present because you don't know how things are going to turn out, so there's always the possibility that this time it might be something extraordinary as opposed to just this perpetual and never-ending self-crippling.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

And the competence of departments is crucial for the well functioning of the country, services high and low. (Diplomacy, war, and education to electricity and roads).

In my view it's both that the State Department, for example, is less competent than before, and that the administration is less likely to listen to the experts and Department officers than before.

(I'm not american.)

> That had short to mid-term positive impacts and long-term catastrophic ones, as is the typical strategy in modern times.

Is the catastrophe still coming from the 70s to now? 50 years later? This is the most repeated quip that makes no sense. Same with companies, everyone just repeats "omg they only care about short term" and then years after years the company trots on.

But I guess it's easy to say since the defense is "oh just wait". As if the online commenter is able to see N+1 moves more than whoever they comment about, but that person just simply cannot. Like come on.

Many of those issues started out fairly small and had a rather small impact relative to the initial benefits of 'financial liberty', but those benefits faded fairly rapidly, while the consequences not only remain, but continue to grow. It turns out that free money is rather expensive.

If you look at the achievements and progress that was being made in the 60s in the US in practically every domain, and then you showed them what 60 years in the future awaited for them, the most common response, outside of digital gizmos, would probably be 'what went wrong?'

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

So for instance a relevant and famous anecdote is that the original tests for Apollo launches didn't have any sort of urine/fecal disposal systems at all. In one delayed launch during testing Alan Shepard was in the capsule for hours and ended up needing to go pee. He asked for permission to depart the capsule, but that was declined to keep it all on track. So he ended up having to just pee all over himself in the suit.

Another piss poor anecdote is Buzz Aldrin on the Moon! When he departed the lunar lander capsule, the impact ended up breaking the urine collection device inside his suit. So his journey on the Moon involved having a healthy dose of urine sloshing around in his boot where it settled.

Of course there's a balance in all things. It's not like they just YOLO'd their way to the Moon. But things where the worst case outcome would be astronaut discomfort were seen as extremely low priority. In the original design, the capsule didn't even have a window or manual controls. So the astronauts were basically just being treated like human Laikas. They had to fight just to get those 'features.'

---

I think a big part of the reason for this is because there are basically infinite things that can go wrong. And so if you obsess on getting every single thing right, you'll end up never doing anything at all. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous 'to the Moon' speech. At that time, we'd only just barely put the first man in orbit but had never done anything beyond that, at all. Just 7 years later a man would walk on the Moon. In modern times we've been basically trying to recreate what we did in the 60s, and spent decades doing so. And this obsession on the details is certainly a big part of the reason why.

I've had a similar conversation with the "but if we really went to the Moon in 1969 why has it taken so long to be able to do it again" folk a few times.

The real answer is of course that we did it once, and realised that a project where about 99% of the failure modes are "astronauts turn into a rapidly expanding cloud of fried mince" and all of these failure modes are incredibly likely was not something we really wanted to do again.

In hindsight we know, that these models were wrong. people were better at predicting risks without relying on formal models. I mean, people were not perfect too, but still they were better. I wonder, if modern engineering has better tools for risk modeling and how good they worked if they were used for Apollo. I mean, if we remove the knowledge specific for space flight, leave only the abstract theory of risk modelling, and then use a time-travel machine to send it to NASA at 1960 or so, could NASA employ modern risk modeling tools to get results on par (or better) to human intuition?

The number of near misses and actual deaths in the Apollo programme loosely indicate the models were right. We just had to up our risk threshold to make the Moon with the era’s technology.

I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.

Not everyone survives to write to an old age.

Old people have health problems that can prevent them from work, like going blind.

People who write a great work at an old age will not have the time and energy to do all the non-writing parts of making the great work seen by readers - which has always been a big part of writing. Like getting their book in bookstores, advertising it, etc.

If someone is a very talented writer they are likely to write great stuff before they get old and may spend their old age preening and working on their legacy instead of new works. They will already know they're a great writer, so the drive to make another great work is lessened.

If someone is already an accomplished writer more of their time will be taken up with invitations to speak, being on award panels, doing interviews, writing introductions.

There is less financial incentive to write a great work when you're very old.

It is harder to be part of a literary salon full of smart people that help you grow your creativity when you're very old.

As people grow older they become more alienated from the zeitgeist and are better at connecting with their own generation.

Everything we personally do will mostly be forgotten in short order in basically all cases. Even the exceptions do little more than stretch out the timeline by a bit. Jeff Bezos of tomorrow will be the John Astor of today; many, if not most, young developers have never even heard of John Carmack. The only real legacy we can ever truly have is our children, because they will be the humanity of tomorrow.

But on the other hand, the world is very complicated and you can't know much in your 20s. I'm today a much better programmer than 10 years ago, even with slightly less brains. You are not going to write an impactfull novel without live experience.

How that declines varies and some people still have most cognitive capabilities in their 70s.

In 6th grade, I had gone to a chess coach who were a friend of my father (technically my father knew his father very well). It was my birthday/a day close to it IIRC and I wanted to learn chess. He was an international-master (or close to it) /National-master (I think he just had one norm less) and he told me about his story and everything, but he said that in a way, he does feel like if he had put the efforts within something like finance for example, he really could earn more than 10 times the money but he said that he really loved chess with a passion. I think that is another element and I think he was within his 30's. Not everyone makes it even that big within chess aside from a very few at the top

You are sort of right in the manner that, as teens grow and the focus of life/dedication from teenage years on solely getting good at chess, diversifies into for example relationships/money-aspects, the mind simply doesn't have enough competition to play chess Comparing this to a 18 year old or 17 year old who just wants to get best at chess and doesn't really want anything else other than chess with their complete and utter dedication.

(There is also another theory recently within Chess of the pressures of being the world champion, from Ding Liren to Gukesh, both have faced tremendous losses after being the best, Gukesh has even lost 75 points after being the world champion, which I believe also has to be because of how many eyes/the pressure building up)

I still like playing chess but all of this makes me also appreciate all the chess players as well in a bit-more behind the scenes manner too. At professional level, calling it taxing sport mentally might even be a bit of an understatement especially for the people within their 30's.

another thing I personally like about Ding and Gukesh both is that they are both humble. They might win or lose but with the brief time that they both had/will have the crown is with their own humbleness. I really like them both a lot. Hope history remembers both their struggles and their humbleness.

He didn't compete for the world champion becaue he didn't want to put in the effort for the preparation (again). Also it would have been boring if he played it because he would have won again.

He intentionally starts with subobtimal openings at major turnaments because of boredom and still wins.

Carlsen's paradoxical because he's undoubtedly the strongest player in contemporary times, if not in the entire history of chess, but his world championship matches have never been particularly impressive. And he thinks that his ability peaked sometime shortly before his match with Nepo. So he probably thinks there's a fairly good chance of him losing if he played another world championship match.

On top of these observations, the one player he was willing to play a world championship match against was Alireza Firouzja. Alireza has an extremely poor record against Magnus, especially in slower time controls, had no experience in the pressures of a world championship match, and Magnus would have been an absurdly huge favorite against him.

In other words, he's not playing a world championship matches because there's a reasonably good chance he spends months of work and effort preparing for it, only to ultimately lose and put that mark on his legacy. Right now it's still perfectly reasonable to call him the GOAT, but if he lost to somebody in a WCC match, that'd now always come with an asterisk.

Regarding boredom, I think that either it was magnus or hikaru who are/were really optimistic about chess960 (randomized chess essentially) because they have less value to openings and more values to the more live-ness of the situation so it has some exciting element to it.

At a certain point for magnus, there really is only enough excitement within classical chess if you are the best players in the world. But he seems excited about chess960

(Edit: you have accidentally made me wonder but would hackernews like a chess club of our community [preferably within lichess]?) https://lichess.org/team/hackernews-chess-club (The password is dang) :]

Edit2: Interestingly, there is already a hackernews-chess-club after searching back on hackernews, https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news, but they had the idea 6 years ago interesting :)

"My favorite player from the past is probably myself, 3-4 years ago.", Magnus Carlsen, 2018.

At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.

Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.

Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.

Betting against these companies is obvious and expected, so the cost of shorting might be high enough that even if you’re correct (stock goes down, the opposition of what WSB said), paying the cost of the short (the fee to borrow the stock from someone else) is high enough that you still lose money.

Also:

1. shorting stocks can be quite dangerous. Your downside is, well, not infinite but it can easily wipe you out.

2. You might be correct that the stock goes down, but over what time frame? Again, you have to pay money to hold a short. Or you’re using a different financial instrument that has a specific timeline. If the market does move in your direction but too late, you still lose.

Or, formally, my claim is A implies B. The only logical contrapositive is non B implies non A. (not losing money means not following advices on r/wallstreetbets)

But you say: non A implies non B, which is the fallacy of denying the antecedent.