The community of people I surrounded myself with ate and drank like Vikings. It worked well in my 20s. It worked well in my 30s. It started to unravel when I was 40. I couldn’t shut it off. All of a sudden, there was no bottle of wine good enough for me. I’m drinking, like, literally the finest wines of the world. Foie gras is not exciting. Truffles are meh. I don’t want lobster; I had it yesterday. What am I looking for, eating and drinking like this every day?
Month: February 2019
Belt and Road
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the most ambitious infrastructure investment effort in history. But is it also a plan to remake the global balance of power?
2023-10-02: Belt and Road is a giant failure
That’s just a mind-bogglingly bad long-term strategy for achieving global leadership. China’s leaders tout their country as the leader of the Global South, but they’re raiding developing countries like their own personal piggy bank. Throughout the whole saga of the Belt and Road, China’s government treated countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Zambia like Chinese provinces — assuming they could and would strongarm their populations into supporting new infrastructure, prioritizing economic throughput over efficiency and profitability, and counting on those other countries to take the hit when the projects went…er…south.
Svendale taproom
Svendale Brewing Co. has planted new roots in Brooklyn in the form of a taproom. The small Carroll Gardens venue will end the need to hunt for their beer at bars in the city, and will feature over 12 drafts from the brewery’s own 10-barrel brewhouse in Millerton, 45km northeast of Poughkeepsie. The taproom is located at 486 Court Street near the corner of Luquer Street, just a short walk from both Folksbier and Other Half Brewing.
Who Killed Tulum?
Even some of Tulum’s biggest critics prefer to look on the bright side: When the wind blows away the seaweed and the house music dims, Tulum is still a great place to be with a margarita in hand while your friends in Manhattan trudge to work in the snow. But the problems are becoming harder to ignore, and there are certain signs that the Tulum bubble is gently deflating. Some hotels are reporting more vacancies than usual, and so many new condos are for rent around town that some had to lower their rates.
The Wandering Earth
The movie is basically a retelling of some of the earlier parts of Genesis. The Chinese do in fact succeed in building the Tower of Babel, both physically and linguistically. They survive that which is analogous to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They thwart the Noah’s Ark plan, reject the notion of their own intrinsic sinfulness, and save the remainder of humanity. It is the Chinese Christ figure who sacrifices himself to achieve the happy ending, thereby overturning what might be understood to be the will of God. By the end of the movie the Chinese can indeed “do anything.”
Fixing the Atmosphere
Geoengineering means that there is a safety net over any climate cliff. We can create artificial volcano effects to reflect heat. Recent studies price this out at $5-8b per year. This technological insurance option backstops the worst case scenarios. Geoengineering can pause and roll back temperature to any level we want.
Medieval Trade Routes
Even before modern times the Afro-Eurasian world was already well connected. This map depicts the main trading arteries of the high middle ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
Electric Hobbits
Prompt: Legolas and Gimli advanced on the orcs, raising their weapons with a harrowing war cry. The orcs’ response was a deafening onslaught of claws, claws, and claws; even Elrond was forced to retreat. “You are in good hands, dwarf,” said Gimli, who had been among the first to charge at the orcs; it took only 2 words before their opponents were reduced to a blood-soaked quagmire, and the dwarf took his first kill of the night. The battle lasted for hours until 2 of the largest Orcs attempted to overwhelm Aragorn. When they finally stopped, they lay defeated and lifeless for miles and miles.
adventures in lotr with gpt-2
New MTA Art
AI Services Economics
In the area of AI risk, many express great concern that the world may be taken over by a few big powerful AGI (artificial general intelligence) agents with opaque beliefs and values, who might arise suddenly via a fast local “foom” self-improvement process centered on one initially small system. I’ve argued in the past that such sudden local foom seems unlikely because innovation is rarely that lumpy.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 