SeeingRed

It's so frustrating to read anything about IMF loans because most summaries are all euphemistic economic jargon. Then you read past the summary and while the material is still opaque, they'll have snippets where they explain in plain language what they want.

I assume this is an attempt to re-shore manufacturing, especially if as many of us expect, many countries choose to take the tarrif hit so that they can keep trading in their own currency between eachother.

It's a strategic bet, bring home some manufacturing while hurting those who defy the empire. It'll certainly reduce the availability of certain goods in the US as countries choose other markets. This likely would help to encourage some level of reshoring, or at least increase pressure from the ruling class to force more coups of other countries to force them back onto the dollar system.

Whether this will backfire or not will is something that is very hard to predict.

This was certainly something. Many points were just horrible, but there was a sprinkle of good positions.

My takeaway was they seek to be connected with both west and east, which probably means connecting to the BRI. Improvements to employment (full employment?) and cost of living are also on the table. They recognize that America, and the west more generally is on the decline and that there is effectively no leadership in that space.

The far right wing screed against LGBTQ and immigration was really horrible to read. Just goes to show that the western culture of hate is alive and well. I'm sure there was more horrible stuff that they said, but I only skimmed the majority of the headings after I got through the first fee sections.

The fact that they are centering companies in their plan seems like a bad idea unless they plan to nationalize key industry (doubt). Maybe someone more well read could speak more to their actual plan here. We know that capital generally will reject full employment unless it is forced to do so. So they have contradictory goals. That being said, contradiction can obviously be managed if it is understood and there is sufficient power/will to do so.

I'm definitely curious about the self cleaning property, and how easily it is to produce (is the process sustainable, toxic, expensive reagents, etc.) That was the biggest issue with a lot of the previous radiative cooling surfaces. If I have time I'll try to read into it more.

There was a neat video on how to make your own from readily available material, but not from cellulose, but it had issues with being clean and application onto surfaces. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI&t=1s

You too!

Flow batteries seem very promising, but the chemistry required needs more scale/external funding to be viable.

There were some thermal battery retrofits for coal power plants using carbon and steam that looked interesting in principal, though cost and logistics are not fully solved problems, and the round trip efficiency was rather bad compared to other storage methods.

There were also some molten metal batteries that have been working towards useful scale over the past decade or so. They had cheap and abundant matetial inputs and significantly long charge discharge.

There are many neat options out there. I think researching and building out each as they become viable would help to improve system resiliency and long term viability.

Its a vague statement. Not specific enough to be true or false.

We can be more specific by saying something like, "inventions and ideas will become refined and widespread when they are beneficial, useful, and practical." Or maybe "necessity is a crucible for refining ideas and inventions."

Even these are only roughly applicable as a generalization and a statement could only be said to be true when given specific conditions and detailed investigation.

For example, the basics of steam power were understood back in ancient Rome, but they didn't make any steam engines to convert heat to useful work. Why? Because they didn't need to. They also likely didn't have the requisite industry to make and maintain them in any useful capacity. The engine was invented before it was necessary, but it didn't become widespread until material conditions made it useful.

Even ideas like socialism have existed for a very long time, but the only place we see it kicking off (so far, inshallah) is within the places that need it the most. Was it invented in those places? No. Was it refined through those struggles? Of course it was.

Im curious how each agent differs, or is trained. Seems they had doctor and nurse agents, as well as patient agents. This would be a good way to start partial implementation. It would allow some tasks to be taken over by the in a hybrid format which could allow an even richer training environment.

I could never see the west doing this in a way that would actually improve the quality of service.

One of the issues with LLM AIs that we've seen time and again is that it can be extremely confident and perfectly incorrect. I have no doubt they are doing their best to train the AI with the best data, but I hope they are also working to solve some of the underlying issues with LLMs.

I believe it could just be "awe" or "awestruck" with it's roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of "awe" is maybe not quite right.

The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I'm not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.

The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don't know much about it.

So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.

However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.

As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.

This is quite the change. I'm excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it's far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.

The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.

There will definitely be a need to have significant amounts of resource (food and other agricultural products) stock piling as the climate becomes more unpredictable and variable. Otherwise famines will be far more common.

Ultimately it'll mean analyzing the conditions as they currently exist and will exist in the coming decades and having realistic plans based on local and global conditions.

Citys, regions, countries, will need to look at what is currently lacking in their response and put in the resources to address the deficiencies. This could include things like cold/hot shelters, flood mitigation infrastructure, massive food storage infrastructure, backup sources for water and energy supply.

For a resource perspective, we would need improvement to efficiency (including removal of capitalist incentives for making products that are not needed and over marketing them for the sake of profit, obviously), and retrofitting cities for lower overall energy and resource use. Having the ability to run a city on less means the storage and buffers needed in the event of an emergency are much smaller.