Net Zero EU

2 reports:

EU Commission https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/default/files/docs/pages/com_2018_733_analysis_in_support_en_0.pdf

and McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Sustainability/Our%20Insights/How%20the%20European%20Union%20could%20achieve%20net%20zero%20emissions%20at%20net%20zero%20cost/Net-zero-Europe-vF.pdf?shouldIndex=false

and Adam Tooze on Social Europe https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-decarbonisation-challenge-wir-schaffen-das

from Tooze:

between now and 2050, almost half the necessary investment will not meet standard investment criteria

need to mobilise €4.9 trillion in subsidies over 30 years. That is the amount of profit taxpayers would need to offer investors to get them interested in the energy transition—€365 for every man, woman and child in the EU27, every year for 30 years.

Total GDP of the EU27 in 2019 was shy of €14 trillion. Overall investment runs to about 22 per cent of GDP. McKinsey suggests that, to achieve net zero by 2050, the EU needs to invest every year about 5.8 per cent of GDP in the energy transition

a carbon price of €100 per ton 80 per cent of the necessary investment could be justified on commercial grounds.

EU’s regular budget is capped at 1 per cent of GDP

NextGenerationEU programme is a step in the right direction, but the €32 billion per annum it allocates to climate spending over the next seven years is far too small

Both modelling exercises predict that a carbon-neutral economy by 2050 will offer more jobs than the fossil-fuel-addicted status quo

Europe’s neighbours in north Africa are obvious clean-energy partners.

As McKinsey remarks en passant, reaching net-zero may require 18 million workers to be reskilled by 2050 but this is small beer by comparison with the 100 million it expects to need retraining already by 2030, on account of what it euphemistically refers to as ‘automation’.

Cultural Brain

start from here http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/cultural-brain-hypothesis/

Innovation and the Collettive Brain, co-authored by Heinrich https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192

Heinrich of WEIRDest people, here’s the paper “The Origin of WEIRD psychology” https://psyarxiv.com/d6qhu/

in other words, How the Church gave birth to WEIRD people https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans

and here somme historian dissenting https://twitter.com/prof_gabriele/status/1192655774029406209

personal nodes

I have this idea that I should be able to export my content from any platform I use to a personal node, a personal online backup or home. Whatever, implment thos bloody API’s, what are those for ?

If I get it right, Winer takes on the problem from the opposite side “writing on the node and syndicating it everywhere” http://scripting.com/2021/02/28.html#a160632

“If we had a good scripting tool for the internet as a whole, then we could pull together all our creations, so at least we could archive, index and make them searchable.”

Cory Doctorow ha s a good 3d on Facebook deficiencies https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1337830028478795776

in the 3d I found (but I don’t know if you manage to find it too, it was a sub 3d of replies” Doctorow’s “Adversarial Inrteroperability”https://www.eff.org/it/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

I’d be happy to have simply the reverse, whenever I write something around, I have the option of easy backing up on my node, in a repurposable format.

BTW adversarial interoperability does not need API’s, it would use directly my logins on the various plaftorms to perform what I instruct my node to do. alt.usenet story, alt stands for alternative or “Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists”? What FUD stands for ? Cory ha the Usenet story on EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

epistemic collapse

there’s lots of fake news and useless experts and pundits, but we have the internet and we had the chance to get to understand the pandemics and do our share, if you think you’re drowning in it than you hould try harder to navigate the news, do not ask for somebody else to control it for you

Asking Facebook to moderate and censor because you are drowning in it is the wrong way, let us preserve freedom of speech on the internet and rather break up facebook, better put create the conditions for more competition on the web, breakup silos patforms and re enable protocols.

lockdown is 1 year old and it has been a year of fake news and experts at large but if you feel overlwhelmed by both, think twice, thanks to the free circulation of ideas and inforamtion, and the Internet, it was possible to find the better course of action for ourselvers (governents) not really.

So going back to fake news, if you think the solution is having Facebook & friends policing content, wrong, they are the problem and we have to preserve freedom of speech, while creating again competition and innovation on the Internet. Antitrust action, not regluation of the Internet.

but then if you really had an epistemic collapse this last year, I feel you but you should asking for more education, more school, more university, not le freedom of speech on the web. Being informed is our duty, in democracy. It’s the dictator that thinks for you, in dictatorship

Brain, Bayes and LSD

(it resounds Sex, Lies and Videotapes, must rewatch)

Our brain is a Bayes machine, senses are not passive recording of the outisde, what they record got checked against the brain’s priors and the result is our perception, which is not a perfect copy of outside we sense.

LSD can relax priors opening up all the beautiful things of expanded percepetion of reality, hallucinations and all sort of universal and mystic things. Anarchic brain, whatever it means, anarchy outside ? For now we should use it in therapy on mental illness https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/

Scott draw a parallel LSD and the Shannafra sword, the author of the papers use the metallurgical metaphor “annealing”. Scotto goes on evoking the machine learning multidimensional landscape of function with local optima where you want to reach the absolute optimum. Well, it takes energy to climb out of the through to the peak and try the next through. LSD flattens the peaks so it take less to go for a better minimum.

Related, Bernhardt in Quantum Computing for beginners, about simulated annealing describes it like giving a lot of energy in a process where energy goes down, high energy get you out of a local minimum, lower energy then is not enough to get you back to the previous minimum ut enough to maybe jump over more peaks and find a better minimum

When you relax priors maybe you start accepting belief that could socially be out of range, funny, it happened to many pioneers https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/

Given the wide range of funny beliefs that the internet has put under the spotlight, isn’t that someone has tampered with the water supply and we are all under the influence of psychedelics? MK-Ultra, history channel https://www.history.com/news/did-the-cia-secretly-dose-people-with-lsd

Patapluffiade

nelle viscere della Grigna vive l’antico popole dei patapluffici

i P sono stati guidati nelle viscere della montagna dalprofeta Patanewton, da secoli non escono per la proibizione del prfeta, hanno dimenticato il perchè e qulche giovane ignaro o cursioso a volte vaga fuori dalla caverna per scoprirlo

a valle della grigna c’è l valsassina, valle di pastori di capre. Dalla notte dei tempi ogni tanto un bambino rotola giù dalla montaga e viene accolto come un figlio, mugugando cotrno quell+”Va, l’assassini” i viaggiatori li chiamano per questo i valsassini e la valle valsassina.

i valsassini si sno incrociato con i patapluffidi caduti per generzioni, ma ogni tanto nascono dei figli che non stanno in piendi e patapluffano che strano

nei boschi sopra la valsassina abitano dei genietti moletsi che tutti evitano, se non li vedi e tisaltano addsso ti si attaccano addosso che non li stacchi più. Ma non sono cattivi, solo ciarlieri e devi sorbirteli per ore finchè non si dicidono a staccarsi. SOno i resinelli e una leggenda vuole che siano creature del bosco che rotolano dalle vette per poi fermarsi nelle pozze di resina del grande bosco di abeti. Avrete capito, patapluffi anche loro. Un’altra precauzione è non dargli cibo, reagiscono violentementeall’offerta di cibo con esplosionu maleodoranti chiamate riflesso gastro-colico

I patapluffi hanno questa camminata a cadute seriali, appena possono sono aterra, a fondovalle è divertente e ci sono tutta una serie di attività e sport che sono nati dalla comppnente ptapluffa. Ma I resinelli vivono ancora in costa di montagana e per non perdere quota continuano a spalmari di resina per rimanere attaccati al proprio mondo

Mentre i Patapluffidi quelli veri, gli originali, continuano a vivere nelle grotta così non rotolano più a valle

Writing Prompt

sei il nuovo papa, ti sei fatto chiamare Polonio I e adesso hai iniziato il processo di santificazione di mussolini sotto il nome di san fascisto. Al posto del crocifisso adesso porti l’appeso al contrario, accampi diritti territoriali sull’Italia come discendente del duce, alla IOR hai imposto di investire tutto in computer quantistici

TFP (total factor productivity, what the hell is it)

Preview(opens in a new tab)

“For centuries, remember, Italians looked up in wonder at the cupola of the Pantheon, the arches of the dry aqueducts, and wondered how they had been built. ” https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/europe-productivity.html

Things that depresses TFP, for future reference. TFP is often quoted as the problem but really seems an epiphenomenon. From Noahopinion https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessimists-part-275

A critique of TFP that I shoiuld read https://growthecon.com/blog/BLS-TFP/

Also, TFP as a proxy of economic success, a measure of ignorance (cit Moses Abramovitz) Why do countries differ in TFP? https://selimraihan.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/why-do-countries-differ-in-total-factor-productivity/amp/

UPDATE 21-04-22: Tyler Cowen says that TFP is really the residual we have since innovation and investement are not the same thing. Here he commments a study that says TFP is additive, grows linearly while Gdp grows exponentially at least lately. Breaks in linear growth happen with mass electrification in the 30’s USA, and with 1st and 2nd industrial revolution in UK https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/additive-growth.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=additive-growth

Analogia

un libro inaspettato, eclettico e pieno di storie che non conoscevo, fondamentalmente autobiografia dell’autore, figlio di Freeman Dyson, cresciuto a Princeton ai tempi d’oro di von Neumann, nascita dei computer, della bomba H e del progetto di suo padre dell’astronave a propulsione nucleare

ma è anche un libro sui kayak, sulle popolazioni artiche e sulle propaggini più a sud, gli ulimi indiani di america, Geronimo e la Ghost Dance, i profeti del riscatto e della venuta dei fantasmi. Esplorazionio, epidemia e stragi.

Il tema che scorre lungo l’autobiografia è quello della dicotomia digitale-analogico e della teoria del continuo, ma è bella anche la storia delle valvole e come si costruiscono i kayak con le pelli, la “wave piercing hill” utilizzata nei design tradizionali alle alueutine e perso nella stabilizzazione del design ai tempi dei russi

e bello avere una casa sull’albero abusiva con vista su Vancouver, costruita con un albero vecchio di 600 anni, si può ancora fare ?