smenor/tangents

Density

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30 people in 20 cars 30 people on 30 bicycles 30 people in 1 bus by Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents.

Well it is the 4th of November 2025 as I

record this and when I've to talk about a few things and as I generally do I
guess the last one of these I recorded on the first thought it was gonna be
doing these like daily and it's been a few days but yeah we'll see we'll see how
things go so I just watched I will get into this stuff I want to talk about
but just a little purpose I just watched back to the future one two and three
which are things that I saw when I was a kid and I remember very distinctly
watching them really liking them all that kind of stuff and they're actually I'm
kind of surprised how well they hold up and I think part of the time travel
thing takes them out of time in a sense that you know like the 1985 stuff I
you don't think about it being out of time because it exists in 1985 so
you know it makes it a little bit more durable in the 1955 30 years prior to
1985 also works 2015 is a little rough and it's it's interesting to me I was
just thinking about this as I was microwaving my my dinner I got pizza today
microwave a couple pieces of that and if you look at like a kitchen from 1955
and you went to a kitchen in 1985 the differences at least in that kind of
respect would be pretty stark like having a microwave it's a pretty big
big thing it's not something that existed then and I guess convection
ovens are kind of a thing although you know not really as a special
more of an incremental improvement but when you look at sort of what they
imagined 2015 to be a decade ago now and what it actually was it's and I
know like predicting the future is hard it's very difficult and there are
things like you tend to overestimate certain kinds of things and you underestimate
other kinds of things so like the stuff like the flying cars obviously that
was ridiculous overestimation there's there's no plausible path to something
like that right now Mr. Fusion we don't have anything that could possibly like
there's not even a nascent technology that could plausibly get there there
are things like the I mean you could do like a new electronic excuse me a new
electronic fusion and maybe you could you know but you're probably not
putting just random garbage into the fuel light you're probably gonna have to
put tritium or other like yeah they did anyway and then you know you think
about like how are you gonna contain that and how you're gonna make it's we're
nowhere near where like maybe and some at some point in the distant future they
probably have some kind of a power cell that's very compact and very dense and
essentially like a compact fusion reaction or reactor that could make your
cars fly and they could do all kinds of stuff like that yeah we're not we're
not anywhere near that you could get your 1.21 jigsaw from something like that
maybe but we're again not really not really gloves and they have this
rehydrateer thing which is just yeah you put a pizza in and like three seconds
later you have a fresh hot pizza pretty pretty pretty far from anything that
we could plausibly have anytime and anytime soon let's just say that
now it would be cool I mean it would be cool to have like a replicator it
would be cool to have something where you say tea or a gray hot and just like
appears out of thin air but again no real plausible path to something like that
anytime soon so it's just it's just kind of interesting to me how both the
predictions are pretty pretty out there and I don't give you a wrong I enjoy
I enjoy the like power laces and the self-drying jacket thing that's
self-sizing and all of this kind of stuff it's cool but I don't know it partly
and I'm not trying to say that things have stagnated because obviously on a
long time scale things have not and there are a lot of technologies that for
example they just did not predict like the cell phones that we had in 2007
did not even come close to anything like that some things look radically more
advanced than that and other things just not even it's like I started watching
like a year ago the old original series of Star Trek and when you look at
some of the stuff that they imagined like warp drive and transporters
we don't have anything like those things we don't have any real plausible
engineering path using not just existing technology but like we can't really
envision something that could be in principle engineered to make those things
work yeah at least in unless you go sort of like the most abstract sense just
couldn't do it maybe and I'm not rolling them out as possible it is although
there are pretty good reasons to suspect that warp drives at least that are
super-liminal probably unfortunately don't exist or maybe it's fortunate I
don't know it depends on your perspective but yeah because the way
relativity works if you can travel faster than light you basically instantly
get a time machine and when I say a time machine I mean like you can go to the
past you can make clothes to time like loops and then all bets are off the
the traveling across the the galaxy or the universe at super high speeds is
about the least interesting thing that happens when you have a warp drive
but anyway getting from getting from that I did them drifting way out of where
I wanted to talk about the thing I wanted to talk about here is the reason that I
brought that up is there was the word density you are my density destiny in the
first one and the density thing and I know this is just this is completely random
and disconnected but the density thing made me think and I'm in LA right now and
I lived in Phoenix for many years and in both of these cases like I spent I've
spent some a few months in Tokyo I've spent like nine months in Paris and it's
really striking to me and I've lived other places I've visited a lot of decent
number of places it's really striking to me how density works in terms of like
cities and in particular like if you look it's it's dark out now as I'm
recording this but if you could sort of look around the neighborhood I'm in it's
a bunch of single family homes and each one of these single family homes has a pretty
big footprint in terms of like the actual land use now maybe it has a little yard or
something but it's a few people in a fairly decent amount of square meters and you
know it's that next to that next to that next to that and this big just vast not
quite endless but if essentially it feels like endless in all directions I could
walk for hours and hours and hours and it'd be just more of the same and you
look at the same stuff and if you imagine like you just picked these houses up and
you stack them on top of each other don't don't do anything else just took
these houses somehow stack them on top of each other like I don't know in a big
building the amount like without changing the density of the city the amount of
free space that you have for parks suddenly magically becomes enormous like you
could have instead of having this thing that feels like there are a couple
trees and they don't give me wrong there are a decent number of trees it's not like
zero plants or vegetation but it feels very far from wilderness if you stacked
people on top of each other you could build parks and it would essentially feel
like you were in wild space like on you know not not not really I don't want to
say civilized it's not the right word unspoiled space and similarly also you
could look at that and then say well what if we do that and then we move some
places together so now you still have the same stacked buildings but you have
it arranged in a way that now you have a little bit more density you still have
also these parks and the reason I talk about these parks in Tokyo it's really
striking like if you there are cities where you walk around the city and I mean
New York has obviously central park but there are a lot of places in New York where
it just feels like dead and barren and I'm not saying Tokyo doesn't have that
as well but there are a lot of places in Tokyo for example where you have these
big parks or big like walking paths and they're next to a river and it just
kind of feels a little bit more natural I'm not going to get I'm not using
Tokyo is like the best example of this but just it sort of shows you a glimpse of
what might be almost kind of possible if you did a really good sort of
rational design for a city and especially if you had a way to quickly I
obviously this is tricky because you have a bunch of existing homes and you
have to get people to be willing to relocate or move their shit or whatever but
if you had the ability to just take you know a big chunk of LA and convert it into
stacked buildings you could get so much so much more and another thing that comes
from that density if you do it well aside from just being able to have these kinds
of unspoiled spaces is now you can put in and again New York has a decent subway
not great but it's decent LA in some places has kind of surprisingly not
terrible subway and in fact if you go on the subway itself it almost feels like
a real city you don't get the same feeling like where you can and again I'm not
not the whole Tokyo but Tokyo or Paris or New York you could just kind of walk
around in a lot of areas and if you get tired you just go okay well fuck
this I'm done walk over to a subway station hop on a train and then take the
train and maybe do a transfer and then you're back wherever you're wherever you're
going if you're here or if you're in Phoenix which is even worse than LA and
this regard you could walk in some direction and first off in LA is at least like
there's some green there's some density some things are not terrible like this
Phoenix there are islands of that but for the most part it's just this vast
suburban sprawl that just goes on in every direction and you could drive for an
hour in almost every direction if you're in central Phoenix literally you
could head in a direction go an hour and it's just suburban sprawl continuously
and it's this low density everybody gets their own private house which means
everybody has to figure out maintenance which means everybody has to have their own
lawn mower because you know a lot of people have ridiculous lawns that don't
really belong in the desert everybody has or you have to hire people to do it
everybody has there's just so much duplication of resources it's such an
inefficient way to organize things and so wasteful as well in addition to just
being like a terrible use of space and I talked to some people about this I
posted something on no I guess in LinkedIn and Facebook about it and somebody
said something I don't remember where but basically said you know like oh I
can't can't stand being stacked at the idea of having somebody on top of me is
terrible and blah blah blah and it's so annoying and I will say I had I lived in
an apartment in Phoenix that was like a four story apartment building and I had
to move because the upstairs neighbors had ridiculously heavy feet and yeah
I was at any time I was in there yeah I hope that's didn't I don't
hope that didn't just blow out your speakers I'm sorry but it was a terrible thing
it was a horrible experience but the thing is a socially you know like you
don't need to walk like that it's something it's definitely something that you
can learn to not be an asshole it's it's not like intrinsically I'm
trying to like to am sure there are people that can't regulate that but I'm
always part you could do something about it but also more importantly than
that it's possible to build things that are insulated well and this is one of
the things that Phoenix really fucks up there are places I had another friend
that said something about you know like well they they thought the same thing
then they moved to an apartment in Scottsdale and it was just silent and of
course if you live someplace that's well built and it's well insulated it's
very quiet even if you have neighbors you don't have to like my sister's place
not super well built expensive but not super well built and she has a
neighbor that's not even attached and in her I'm standing in the kitchen right
now and for some reason the neighbors right next door I don't know what they're
doing but they're walking or whatever it literally sounds and that this is a
three story building literally sounds like they're above me like it's it's
the weirdest thing and I can I suspect probably what it is is the you know it's
like some kind of resonance thing or like the structure of their place is
similar enough to this that the frequency that things happened to to click
at over there are similar over here and then if they're stepping in a certain
place that distribution of frequencies resonates over here and then it
sounds like the same kind of thing I don't know if that's the case or not it could
be you know making up the story but it kind of makes sense to me there's
something definitely going on because it really does feel like there's somebody
above you even though obviously there's not but it's it's weird I don't know
what it is but again you can build things that are not like that you can
build things with proper insulation and another advantage that you get with
this kind of structure is like if you look at the volume to surface area the
more surface area you have for unit volume the more heat dissipation you have
so the more either heat coming in or heat going out that you have so that means
more insulation more climate control it's it's less efficient just in
general and so if you stack things on top of each other and you do it well you
could have things where you have less insulation or you use less power to
maintain a comfortable temperature that's that's not that complicated you could
do a lot of things and I just like the way that all this stuff is done and the
thing I think that fundamentally it comes down to is like everybody is
optimizing for themselves personally without consideration of anyone else and
when you do that what that ends up doing is making things fuck for everybody
including yourself incidentally I've talked about this a few times but like I'm
a pilot and being a pilot is kind of cool it's kind of fun but a it's
ridiculously expensive like in practical and unless you make a fuck ton of
money it's very expensive and it's kind of weird actually I follow people on
on YouTube who for example have a serious SR22T turbo it's it's like a
over a million dollar plane and I don't know how I don't know what these people
I mean I do kind of like know what they do for a living I don't know how they're
making the money that they're making but they have enough money to pay for that
and it just doesn't it doesn't almost add up it's kind of weird like they
the and I understand also like the amount that some people make is just so
unfathomable and that you know you see like a glimpse of that and that the
person that has like a million dollar claim they're poor compared to the
person as a 10 or 20 million dollar jet who is poor compared to the person as a
50 million dollar jet who is poor compared to the person that has a multi-hundred
million dollar jet you know it it stacks up pretty badly and of course when you
start getting into that territory you start seeing the people that are a way
above you and so the stuff that it seems like a ridiculous luxury to standard
plug-in and in those circumstances it's like oh that's that's pathetic that's
sad like they they see the serious as sort of like a poor person you know like oh
that's that's cute right you know that's or maybe it's a hobby thing but it's
not really a thing that you would want to do and I understand that because it's
yeah and this is kind of what I'm talking about if you fly that a it's it's
let it gas which is fucking weird the fact that we haven't gotten rid of
let it gas and they're they're slowly phasing it out and there are there
technical like there are good technical reasons why they haven't I'm not
trying to say oh you should just do it in that you know there there there is a
reason that stuff is the way it is they're phasing it out slowly over time but
it's it's it's obscene that we've got let it gas still in 2025 and knowing the
damage the tetraetha lead does to people it's it's just wild and then yeah
the piston small single engine piston aircraft and again like a serious it has
the cap system the service the airframe parachute it it makes it relatively
safe relatively but that engine fails and you're kind of fucked and you know
like the best case scenario and you're coming down and you use the parachute
you're in a situation we're using the parachute as viable are you gonna land
on somebody's house are you gonna you know like what happens there and then it
has this crush stuff underneath which keeps you from getting really badly
injured but still yeah you're getting a few G's you're getting enough G's to do
some damage it's not great for you and then yeah you're probably not gonna be
in a fire but you could be good there was a I don't know if it was FedEx or UPS
or DHL or something something just I can't remember what it was it was like Louisiana
to Hawaii just literally today had a failure this is a jet plane by the way so it's
not like a single engine plane had an engine fire and a failure and then took
off and immediately crashed and crashed full of fuel to go all the way to Hawaii
so pretty bad outcome and that's that's a jet engine that's a thing where you have
more reliability of ideally more maintenance although I I do wonder with stuff
like this you know if you don't maintain stuff well and it's expensive to maintain
it eventually things fail and because it's expensive and because people are trying
to cut cut corners and cuts costs and all those kind of stuff and again they're
optimizing for short-term personal benefit without sort of long-term or
collective benefit in mind not certainly not optimizing for the crew they don't
care about that they just want to pay the least amount of money for things and
certainly not for the people that are gonna be endangered by this stuff or any of
this stuff because of that problem I think a lot of companies are not
maintaining stuff at the level that used to or they should be certainly but
anyway going back you have that even if you have a jet like the serious is
like puddling around in the sky you can go like if you're going from Phoenix to
say Sedona it's a nice kind of half hour 45 minute flight it's not too bad you
can go to the grand canyon you can even go to Colorado and it's not that bad
or even LA is not that bad expensive but not that bad but when you start going
on anything longer distance than that it's really annoying because you're gonna
have to land you don't have a bathroom on the thing so you gotta pee if it's
if you're single pilot even if you had a bathroom on the thing and people do
have like urinal kind of they I mean they I can't even remember what they're
called but it's like a thing that you can pee into they have that sort of
stuff and if you oh look at this mom Donnie was just elected mayor of New York
city so I just got a text message saying this and fuck yes hell yeah and it's
fucking like fuck chuckles by the way shumer I will get back to this
thought I wanted to talk about it just the number of fucking Democrats vote
blue no matter who who would not endorse this motherfucker and I'm not like
I don't think endorsements are really I have in effect I have very serious
problems and doubts about electoral politics and especially like the
popularity contest stuff and all that I've talked about this I think the
last time and a couple other times but you know that I and I don't think
endorsements are that big of a deal but it is the standard thing to do and
chuckles I'm pretty fucking sure voted for the sex pest voted for the asshole who
should not have even been running should not have been like the fact that you
let people like this run like the fact that that motherfucker had any kind of
career at all at all after the shit that he did it's just it's just fucking
ridiculous it's laughable it shows how low your fucking standards are just like
the main Nazi guy like the fact that that guy didn't get drummed out the fact
that there are people defending him it's fucking wild and ridiculous it
fucking bizarre and anyway I'm gonna take a minute now and just enjoy this
and message some people and then I will resume so hopefully it won't be too
much of a disruption but you won't even notice the time passing okay I'm
processing this and I gotta say it feels fucking good it feels fucking good I
needed I'm not saying I needed a win I mean you know obviously things are okay
for me I'm not like in a terrible terrible position I have you know a place to
stay I have a roof over my head I have food I have you know relatively
comfortable situation even though it's not ideal but I will say this motherfucker
winning and all the fucking assholes like oh we're gonna leave New York if he
wins and all these fucking islamophobic like openly openly islamophobic
things about how it's like in 9-11 kind of fuck you fuck you fucking people you
absolutely big assholes get the fuck out get the fuck out leave the keys behind
that you know New York is not your city go fuck yourselves it just irritates
me it fucking irritates me don't get me wrong also it's fucking beautiful like
chuckles today literally fucking today said he voted for somebody and he'll
something something like whoever is the mayor wouldn't even didn't have the
fucking balls to say that he didn't vote for Mombani obviously didn't vote
for fucking Mombani did like fucking asshole fucking asshole needs to
resign asshole needs to fucking resign and he's not the only one like so many
these just you know like you guys you have had so much fucking given to you
so much shit you have the ability to retire you have like think about how
many people in the US could retire and you could be so fucking comfortable I
don't even know what his net worth is but it's comfortable enough he could
retire his is fucking retirement plan which most of us like he's got a fucking
pension you know what a pension is you know what a pension is like pensions
this is how pensions exist anymore my dear they're about there my dad worked 29
years and 11 months for national steel and that's that's kind of an odd amount
of time it almost sounds like 30 years but it's just not quite 30 years you
know why because this the company got acquired and there was a bunch of other bullshit
I'm not I don't want to get the details too much but the basic thing is at 30
years you would have found his full pension and because it was 29 years and 11
months and you know like basically got fucked out of the full pension deliberately
so by design and now like a pension is just not even a thing people can you you can't even
conceive of the notion of it people in the fucking government they have them and when I say
people in the government I mean the fucking senators have them and it's just irritating it's
fucking irritating it's one of the things that really pisses me off about the main Nazi guy
because this motherfucker A he went to private school he's not a poor kid he went to private
school could have gone to a nice university but instead volunteered the join-up and went off
and they did a tour and they did another tour they did another tour and they did another tour
that I think that was for right and then he worked for fucking black water as a mercenary like it
it's just it's just disgusting and that motherfucker could potentially be a senator which would
mean not only does he get a almost 200 thousand dollar a year salary which is not going to be
his only salary but you know like plus staff which would be into the millions of dollars plus a lot
of travel benefits plus health care plus retirement plan and six years of job security and
all this did you just do not let this motherfucker get into the goddamn sent do not there are other
people there are hundreds literally hundreds of thousands of people at least by my math based on
demographics and the number of registered Democrats in Maine it's order of 200 thousand people
who are eligible in Maine to be a senator and you're picking this guy with the fucking coat and
cough for 20 years with the black water mercenary who like I mean like the more I learn about them
too like oh he the one thing that sounded like halfway good about him it's like oh he said he was
a socialist or a communist once well yeah except he completely disavowed that it took a bunch of
brow-beating before he said anything about the Nazi tattoo or anything about it but without any prompting
the motherfucker went off in disavowed and you could just search for this but there's been a bunch
of articles disavowed being a communist and being a socialist which would have been like the one
nice thing about him and no he won't do that it's just it's just like the guy could go fuck himself
and the fact that people are sitting there saying like oh you got it we got it we got to take
what we can get no one fuck you fuck you I'm so fucking tired of that bullshit it's so I'm not
like I'm not a great politician by any means I would not want to be in elected office to be honest
but I ran I've run a couple of times I ran as a green in within Andy Biggs's district so
Gilbert Arizona a little bit of a right-wingingish kind of place but I ran openly as a very
lefty green candidate wearing a mask and I swear to God the only reason I didn't come close to I mean
I still I still did pretty well I have to say I feel pretty good about how I did but there were two
seats three candidates no Democrat even running bothered the I mean there was one person who kind of
like half-est ride but and and to her defense the signature requirements for running for these
offices are ridiculous so you know she didn't put in the time in the effort the money to get them
but also they are exorbitant there to be fair but she didn't get ballot access I had ballot access
so it was like green Republican Republican two seats if you mother fuckers would have voted for me
like you know that the the house and the Senate in Arizona are like two seats from tipping
do you know what one or two seats would do and especially like if it's one or two seats
that somebody like me instead of just a Democrat that's a powerful fup in position to be in
it's not like I'm yeah anyway I don't want to the main reason I don't think I won is if
there don't lot of Democrats didn't vote for me because they saw a green and they're like fuck you
there's no you know you should have voted for me if you guys it would have sucked for me I would have
done the job but it would have sucked I wouldn't have been too excited about it but I I know
with a lot of confidence because I talked to a bunch of people granted I didn't do I didn't
didn't do polling so maybe I'm just speculating here maybe I'm not right I think I'm right
I am pretty fucking sure that a bunch of Democrats did not vote for me bunch of Republicans voted for
me because these two Republicans were assholes I met them both their garbage people
they're both in the state house now of course terrible people fucking horrible people
but a bunch of Republicans and independence voted for me I and quite confident of that
and these are the independence also like the Democrats are always talking about how oh we got to go
for the independent you don't know who the fuck the independence are like this is I hate all this
shit this middleing bullshit like oh well we have to go in the in the middle the air quotes
middle between the Democrats who are right of Reagan just to be clear they are right on many
issues of Ronald fucking Reagan who was the the example of terrible right wing politician
and then you have between that that's the the leftist point that they're starting from and the
guy damn fucking white nationalist crystal fascist and our go capitalist radical Republicans
someplace between those two is where they're going to try to put themselves that's why they
abandoned trans people that's why they abandoned immigrants that's why all this other bullshit
and they did all that stuff and completely alienated people like me who otherwise would have been
you know and you know they like the funny thing is it doesn't even look like Harris lost
because of the genocide which is pathetic the genocide should have done it for but even with that
she could have won but she did all this other shit chasing after people who were never going
to vote for her never going to vote for her nobody wants for public and light she's chasing after
them giving a middle finger to anyone even left of Reagan and the of course you lost a fucking
course you lost it's pathetic the only thing she had to offer was marginally better than Trump
and even that is generous because like in the fucking debate she and Trump got in an argument
over who is more pro-frakin in a time when we're in like a pivotal point in the climate catastrophe
or we could actually still do something to not be in like a horrible fucked up position
and you two are arguing over who can get us their faster like fuck you fucking pieces of shit
anyway I'm I'm just enjoying this I really am I'm not I'm not trying to be like better
and giving too much of a middle finger here and obviously you have to reach across the island
and there's everybody's mayor and I think it's still fuck all you people fuck all you people who are
sitting there talking about how and they don't also like the Islamophobia the red scare bullshit
all this other shit this stuff like oh we can't have socialized medicine every other in fact
I'm not even going to say every other because they say every other developed country implies
the US is a developed country every developed country has universal health care every developed
country has some form of if not like free education the amniere free higher education
or very inexpensive higher education every developed country has like social safety nuts of
some form and the United States is not a fucking developed country this is how you know this is
like they're they're the tells if you look at safety for example the US is not close the US
is ridiculously dangerous now it is true like even being ridiculously dangerous it's not as dangerous
as people imagine but compared to a lot of places it's fucking dangerous it's fucking ridiculous
your the life expectancy here is decreasing and it's not that great your healthcare sucks
your healthcare and it's like it's people will always say oh we have the best healthcare in the
world if you can pay for no even if you can pay for it even people who have money they can pay for
now if you have a certain amount of money I will I will give you like if you have so much money
you can have a private doctor and like real concierge career maybe you're in an okay position but
even then it's dubious because pe private equity taking over everything and they're doing the
concierge stuff they're not they're not your friends they're not taking care of you but if you're
a normal person and when I say a normal person I mean even if you're making like hundreds of thousands
of dollars a year and you have air quotes good health insurance your experience if you ever
needed if you ever get really sick if you ever have a bad accident or your kid gets cancer
or whatever the fuck you're gonna find pretty quickly that shit sucks that fucking shit sucks
you will have millions of dollars a dead very easily or it'll certainly drain whatever savings you
have and you know it never might also like if you get if you age in this country they will do
all of this stuff that will just rob you of your money rob you of any assets you have and then
you know you're just fucked it's not gonna really extend your life it's certainly not gonna
improve your quality of life but maybe maybe you'll live like an extra six months or a year or something
but it'll suck it'll be miserable and it will completely eliminate any good experiences that
your your family has with you and anything you can hand down to them and it's just it's just like
it's so fucked here it's so fucked does not need to be this way it does not need to be this way
this is one reason why I do wish and I understand like people don't have the resources to travel
which is kind of a fucked up thing about this country I do think the right to roam which includes
having an ability to do it and I'm not saying everybody should be flying around the planet all the
time but there should be ways like high speed trans for example and you know maybe electric or
nuclear boats that let you travel places without having a huge carbon impact and with those things
you should be able to see other places and if you see other places and you learn about other stuff
you start looking and you're like why is it so fucked up here if you go I talk a lot about Japan
because I've been there a few times but you go there or you go to China or you go to France or Spain
or you know like most other countries most other air quotes developed countries the
actually developed countries there's fucking high speed train like high speed train powered by
nuclear reactor so it's essentially carbon neutral they travel thousands of kilometers
across China in hours it's it's wild it's wild how fucked up and shitty it is here
but anyway I'm I'm kind of I'm simultaneously like really enjoying this and also just
unloading a little bit because I'm fucking irritated with all these people
but keep making things worse the keep you know like truckles needs to fucking retire
and when I say truckles I'm focused on him because he is one of the more prominent Democrats
but I mean even even even the guys that I like even even like a Bernie needs to retire
even the only Democrat that I can think of at a national level who I even feel like a little
maybe she could stay is Rashida and I'm a little nervous even about her just as I'm as much as I'm
talking about mombani and I like him I'm technically notice I'm not I'm mostly talking about other
things that are negative but you know there's a lot of positive stuff about him he's pro cop right
he's not my favorite kind of position on that let's just say you know Rashida is a Democrat
and the fact that she's a Democrat even with all the party going against her even with them
trying to primary or all this other bullshit I still worry but I've never seen anything specific
from her that gives me pause and I've only seen good stuff from her so you know maybe she's okay
but I just I just remembered Katie Porter that fucking video of her chewing ass out of a
a staffer though I don't know if I talked about that before but if you haven't seen it
and this is one of those things also like you could tell and I I'm going to talk a little bit
about literacy because there's there's a literacy that people like there's the obvious literacy
which is you can pick up a piece of text and read it that is a sort of literacy right but there's
also a literacy which is you could read between the lines you can understand more than what is just
there at the surface level you can read a piece of work and understand like what is the author
trying to say kind of understand what is the context in which this exists what is it mean
what is what is the significance and and it's not just written material it's also things like that
video and you can see like there's a difference between somebody is just somebody who is like stressed out
and somebody you know like pushes a little too hard at the wrong time and they snap at them
that's the thing that happens right that's a that's a thing that could happen to all of us
but when you do that you catch yourself pretty quickly you apologize pretty quickly
if you watch that Katie Porter video what you actually see is her being just completely shitty
to her staffer who just got in the shot and the staffer corrects her on something that she was
bad and mistaken on and she choose them out completely and the way that it comes off there to me
is this is a person who has a nice kind of mask that she puts on in public and that's not
who she is she's the person who like the actual Katie Porter I'm pretty sure is the one chewing
other stuff and it's also like you you look at that there's other reports of stuff like this it's
not like there's not the first time that you've heard about this is just the first and worst
video that I've seen of redoing it and you look at that and it's just like this is your fucking
governor and your governor to real candidate who's good and like again California is not a small
state right you have lots of people who are eligible to be governor here first off we don't really
need and I'm not saying that you can't have white people be in office but we fit we fit we've
don't we don't have harm you know there's there's something like this state has plenty of other
people who could be in office maybe maybe give them a chance and of course also I'm not saying
that just because somebody happens to be black or brown they're automatically good like
have a fucking threshold because there are plenty of people who are terrible who just happened to
look a certain way I will say actually the mayor of Los Angeles I'm pretty fucking pissed off at
and I I'm so irritated with myself here because I should have known I should have known that she
was a piece of shit but you know like I Coruso terrible person he's a Republican
Rianna's a Democrat this is the problem because all these fucking things and this gets back
to that main fucking Nazi guy you get you you have so many people who could run for these
offices they make it very difficult the access requirements for running for office are huge
this is one of the reasons why a lot of people don't do it because in addition to not
really understanding civics and not learning about it getting ballot access is a giant fucking
pain in the ass if you have resources and you're plugged in it's not that big of a threshold it's
not that big of a hurdle but if you're just a regular person and you want to run for Congress
or for mayor of Los Angeles or for mayor of New York for that matter it takes so much effort just
to get on the ballot it's ridiculous and then once you're there it takes so much money and effort
in time that you you basically have to be a little bit rich you have to have something going for
you you have to be very known in advance or be extraordinarily charismatic or have you know a few
things kind of in your pocket that are helping you otherwise it's just not a realistic thing
or you have to have so much time there's a reason that a lot of people like the people who actually
end up getting on the ballot who are not in the sort of normal sort of path they're either
people like Andy Biggs who won the fucking lottery like you look up how he got well it wasn't the
lottery I guess it was the publishers fairing house or whatever so some kind of you know basically
won the lottery equivalent he did that and he's like well I've got this money now I'm going to run
for office that will get you in you can pay to get ballot access absolutely you can pay to have
people do an image for you and make all your your stuff and get you the point where you're kind of
presentable and that the threshold is low right if you're somebody who's extremely like you're
retired and you have an extreme amount of time and a lot of energy and a lot of ability to do
stuff that can get you in yeah you can convert a little bit of you know sort of horsepower
elbow grease so to speak you could convert that to the equivalent of money you're going to spend
a lot more time in effort than somebody with money or who's plugged in but you could still do it
and the other one is like if you're a deadbeat dead cinema kind of person a guy ego or you're a
space cinema kind of person like Mark Kelly and your wife was was she a senator or she I think she was
a representative I don't even remember what the fuck she was it was before my time but whatever
her's wife was you can you can get in to the party and then they set up this thing where it's like
okay well the second that you go you're going to have all these donations and you're going to look
this is I'm sure what happened with this so sparking may not see guy do a bunch of stuff
so behind the scenes all of a sudden you come out of the gate and you look like you're an explosive
just overnight sensation because you had a lot of help and you had a lot of people kind of
pulling for you and doing stuff for you um you know it's not real let's just say that and then
you can get on there and that's that's one way to get it and what it should be and in Germany
in other places it's a little bit better on this random people should be able to go in fact it
should be random people running for office and in fact also if it's I've said this in the last
one or maybe two ago if you recognize the name of somebody on the primary ballot and there's
somebody else you don't recognize the name of by default you should vote for the person who's
name you don't recognize if somebody who's name you don't know asks you to sign their thing
their petition to get ballot access probably sign it there only hesitation I have there is that
the way that it's set up which is fucked up is at least in Arizona you can only sign one for each
so you can't sign like five different petitions you should be able to you should be able to
say okay you want to be secretary of state sign years old sign years old sign and in fact also you
shouldn't even have to it should be like if you want to be secretary of state or senator or any
kind of statewide office you personally and you can't send a proxy to do this you can't pay people
to do it you can't it has to be you you have to go around to like each district or whatever
and get signatures it doesn't have to be a lot of signatures it could be five signatures
from each county or something like that or maybe it's 20 signatures I don't really care there's
some threshold that is reasonable it's like enough that it's not going to be like
everybody doing it but it's not ridiculously intractable right that should be the threshold
and then each time there's a primary should be a lot of people right and personally I
talked about this before but I think certification is the right way like it shouldn't even be
people deciding that they want to run because the people that decide that they want to run
probably are you know like almost by definition not the people who should be in those positions
and I include myself there like the fact that I even thought that me running is a good idea
probably a red flag and certainly like if you look at like Trump or Hillary or genocide Joe
or or Harris or space cinema or deadbeat dads cinema or the main Nazi any of these people
none of these people should be in office none of these people should be anywhere near the levers of power
chuckles nobody should you know he should have been at most like a one or two term or
and then go off and do something else it's ridiculous that he is in the position he's at
it's ridiculous that Pelosi is able to decide she's not going to run again and just keep running
and going until then that's that should not be the fact that that happens the fact that you
have people that just do this their whole lives I just hear my mom's cat is just staring at me right
but the fact that you have that should be a red flag that's something like it's a problem it
means you don't have an actual democracy he's he's really staring in totally at me it's very
distracting in which I had a picture of this I don't have my phone with me it's over in the other
side and if I move over there to get it he's going to he's going to bolt so there's no way I'm going
to get a picture of this but it is funny and it's distracting but anyway hey Snoop what are you doing
what are you doing um totally blew my mental stack I have no idea what I was going to talk about next
I guess what am I what was I going to talk about I have the I'm looking at my notes
I had the Trump thing in back to the future I thought about talking about that I don't really
want to talk about that I'm much more excited about on Donnie right now and uh don't really want
to think about that I do think one thing I do want to talk about actually is I was reading this
shit um I don't know why I'm on fucking LinkedIn I I know I don't kind of why I'm on LinkedIn
but I should be on LinkedIn isn't there's nothing good that comes from being on LinkedIn if I'm
if I'm being completely honest it's just a waste of time it's just a terrible place to be
but but but I come to I come in here and they have the like trending stuff and in the trending
stuff you know one of the things they have uh today was this thing by the CEO of Google
and he's like our our TPUs are heading her tensor processing units are headed for space
inspired by the history of moon shots from quantum and reading this because it's yeah
from quantum computers to autonomous driving project sun catchers exploring how we could one day build
scare scalable machine and it's ML but machine learning compute systems in space harnessing
more of the sun's power which in its more power than a hundred trillion times humanity's total
available like any moon shop level one and so they they talk about these you know early research
so shows that our new TPUs uh survived without damage when tested in a particle accelerator
to simulate uh low earth orbit levels of radiation which I I'm really yeah either they're using
very large features or I really might my suspicion is it's like what what is the dose and what
is the duration when you talk there's a lot that goes under radiation testing and you like you
could put anything you could stick your head in a particle accelerator and if it's a brief enough
blast and the doses in that much you might be fine you could also you know sit there for hours and
hours and be cooked um you know if you put chips in space and you have cosmic rays
it's not good for you it's not good for the chips the chips will fail there's a reason that we use
technology in the space that is very like the features are large the stuff is like decades old
it's rad hard and all this kind of stuff but never mind that one now never mind that now the thing
about being in space the thing the reason that the stuff is ridiculous completely fucking ridiculous
is like you look at all these um and I I'm that word is escaping me for some reason
you look at all these data centers and they're extremely extremely thirsty they take ridiculous amounts
of water what do you think they're doing with that water what do you think that they need that water
for it's per cooling and for the cooling like all the power that you put into the thing is going
to come out as waste heat that's that's just how energy works that's not like that's the basic
thermodynamics that's night somebody who's taking you don't even have to take a semester
of thermodynamics you should just kind of know that but you put energy in and even if you do work
that's useful with that it's going to eventually just be waste heat so what do you do with all
that heat and space you don't have lots of water and even if you had lots of water you are stuck
with radiate of cooling and I mean I guess if you had a ridiculous amount of water you could do
evaporative cooling with it that's not a very sustainable way to do stuff because it's just like
evaporating off into nothing but if you're just doing radiative cooling you look at the space station
you see all those solar panels and then they have these other things that are about as big as the
solar panels those are to radiate away heat and the space station doesn't have like huge amounts of
power that it's using I mean that the I guess it depends on what is your scale of huge amounts of
power but compared to like the power density of say a data center not a huge amount what are you
going to do with all that fucking heat there's just it's is that feasible there's no way you can have
a huge data center lying in space in a sun synchronous orbit they're talking about so that's
it's in it's at least somewhat radiation protected because it's not in like higher
but it's still it's going to be in a place where it's in the sun all the fucking time
the sun is putting in a lot of energy now you make get a lot of power out of that you get a lot of heat
coming in from that you got to balance the heat off somehow and you got to radiate away all that
extra heat so you gotta have like it's just I don't know the whole thing irritates the shit out of me
because it's just and then he says
however significant challenges remain like thermal management and onboard system reliability
I just kind of like wave those you know just just kind of like casually throw those out
thermal management is a complete deal breaker for this it's it's not like a trivial thing it's a
thing that is going to kill it or I guess you can I mean certainly you can have processing
on the edge and you can do like small amounts of compute for certain things but you're not putting
the fucking data center in sun synchronous orbit it's certainly I guess if you have like massive
amounts of space infrastructure and you can build huge radiators you could do it but we're not there
we're not anywhere near there and if you're launching shit you're just it's just that feasible it's
not fucking feasible and it irritates the shit out of me because this kind of also like you look at
him the fact that he's CEO fucking pisses me off but never mind that now he's CEO he has
he went to the Wharton School at an MBA from there yeah that's just like fucking but he also has
a masters in material science and engineering from Stanford and then batch physics and technology
from IIT so the masters in material science and engineering you would think would cover thermodynamics
and the thing that bothers me is like if you understood the least amount about thermodynamics you would
know this is not fucking feasible and it's just like I don't know you think about also the amount
of power like the amount of money that is going to go into this the do space kind of stuff
making chips and going you're like launching them I don't get me wrong I do support and like
general interest kind of stuff I like basic research it's very important to do it's very useful to
do and you know I completely support that that's not what they're doing though they're doing this
air quotes moon shot to put server farms in sons and granos orbit and it's just pretty much
ridiculous and the fact that you have people running companies like trillion dollar companies
allocating tens hundreds of billions of dollars for these projects it's just so misguided
it's the opposite like I'm sitting here at the beginning talking about how you know if you
rationally designed a city and you did it well you could put in a bunch of density you could have
you think about like just looking around here you could have all these people in smaller homes
currently with a lot more space and that space could be much more comfortable you could have gardens
and parks and all those kind of stuff around them you could have a bunch of restaurants and shops
all over the place within easy walking distance and highly accessible so if you're a wheelchair user
you can get right to them you can go like five minutes from wherever you live and you're on a
fucking train and then you go from that train to a train state and you know like a little local
light real kind of thing or better get a subway you go from that subway to a train station
and then you get to that train station and you can go a couple thousand kilometers away in you know
a day and you're doing that on sun power that mean literally in Phoenix
or an Arizona weather you could power trains going up and down the state with solar going a
few hundred kilometers per hour and it would be like I took this bus I think I talked about this
I took a greyhound from Phoenix to the flag staff a couple of months or two ago
and it was okay it was fine not my favorite thing I wouldn't do it again
ended up taking a car back with some other people that were there wouldn't do it again
and you think about the experience of doing that like the frequency it was two two greyhounds a day
do that trip if you go from like say you live in Tokyo or Kyoto and I'm sorry I could go
back to Japan but if you are there during the normal days especially like a weekend
every five minutes literally every like three to five minutes there's a fucking high-speed train
a shinkansen going from Kyoto to Tokyo and like or Osaka and you're just like every
fucking five minutes that's there you don't have to go through security you just get to take it
doesn't cost that much it's not like cheap cheap but it's pretty cheap it's powered by hot rocks
or in Arizona it could be powered by the fucking sun there's a place where fucking solar is a good
thing because you have like heat dissipation you could actually do something with it you have
sun falling on the ground anyway the heat is still there no matter what you're doing
and you know like the if you look at the US power consumption you could put a solar farm
and I'm not saying that this is a thing that you do practically because but you know in terms of
the actual energy used by the US it wouldn't even be that much of Arizona like there I've seen
maps of this it's a shockingly small amount of Arizona could give you the power that it would
take to power the whole fucking country and you think about also like in Arizona the time that you
have peak demand is exactly the time that it's the brightest out which means exactly the time
that you get the most solar and people sit there and they're like oh well you have to what
have what you do when the sun goes down you have batteries first of all but also when the sun goes
down you don't have to run the air conditioning as much you don't have to use as much power
the time when you need the most power the time when they have like the biggest loads when they
spin up the fucking coal fire of plants is during the hot summer sun sunny times and that's when
the solar does the best and you know like you think about like they started putting solar on the
Jimmy Carter's not perfect but solar panels on the fucking White House which Reagan of course took off
in one of the many ways that Reagan's a piece of shit but you know you put those fucking solar
panels on every house in Arizona and you don't even need a grid necessarily now the grid is nice
because it can act as a battery and you can have centralized batteries and things like this so instead of
having like individuals having to maintain their own systems you can have that for everybody or you
can have like a small battery at home and then you have like the grid that you know but if you
would have done this decades ago Arizona would be a net power producer instead of you know like a
place full of dirty power full of natural gas and full of coal plants still and all this kind of
shit it's just it's so fucking annoying that we don't do that it's so annoying that you know like
you look at that greyhound it was like two or three hours to get from Phoenix the flag staff and you
know not very comfortable and everybody's coughing and it's gross versus again like shit
constant or TGV kind of thing or the Chinese bullet trains a few hundred kilometers per hour you do
that math and it's like less than an hour you go from Phoenix to flag staff and of course also you
have a train in both ends so you're not like you have good public transit and you just look at
like that that could be there and it's powered by the sun and it could be frequent and it could be
automated you know like automated cars or thing you can do automated trains or a technology that we've
had for decades and decades and it's only better now and if you want to make them even better still
you can easily and we don't have it it's just so fucking annoying the place that we are and this is
and I guess this is actually I'm going to be wrapping up because you know I'm about an hour seems
like a good place to break the thing about Maldani that I really just want to tap off here
is just better things are possible and I'm not again I don't think he's perfect the cop thing
bothers me you know all this kind of stuff but the faculty one I hope launches a thousand other
campaigns you know how it starts like making people realize what's possible realized what they
fucking should have and he's going to be the mayor and he's not going to get everything that he wants
he's not going to be able to do everything he wants but he's going to fucking try if he even does
10% of the stuff that he's setting out the deer and people start seeing what you can do what is
possible what else is possible you know what else can you do and this is this is also why I
get so fucking incensed with the Democrats because they do shit like you know we're going to do a 5%
solution we're going to you have the student loan crisis which is trillion's of dollars and we're
going to help you know a few hundred billion dollars of that in such a small amount that actually
it gets washed away by interest almost immediately which is fucking beautiful and it's not
to say that it didn't help people but it doesn't help that many people that much and it could be
so much fucking better it does not need to be like this and you start seeing the possibilities
I just hope that people will start understanding how fucked they are and I don't mean an
permanent way but I mean just in the way that we're like there's no reason to spend hundreds of
this is one of the reasons I talk about cops all the time we spend hundreds of billions of dollars
a year on fucking cops in this country on law enforcement for nothing it doesn't make us safer
they don't even really solve crimes you know like only 5% of what cops do has anything to do with
violent crimes and most of that is after the fact and most of that doesn't actually help anybody
and certainly doesn't prevent anything and it's like you're spending all this money you know what
actually does reduce crime giving people money making people comfortable giving people education
giving people a safety net giving people better lives that shit makes you safer that shit keeps
people from doing crime because people don't need the fucking steel people don't need like there's
there's no point to it at a certain point if everybody is comfortable you're not like why
why would you do it it's just silly like it's not to say that crime goes away completely
but it can mostly go away it would be like a weird anomalous thing like this good anyway and I
don't even want to get into that it's just better things are possible let's do better things let's
imagine more and again like everything that exists in the world that people have made it never it
wasn't like handed down by God in that way everything around us is somebody's shitty idea
or a good idea but you know somebody's idea some confluence of ideas some confluence of stuff
that people did together we hit the world is what we make it make it better so congratulations again
Mamdanee and if you're thinking about running and you're not a shithead please do
and again I don't even want to talk about like beyond electoral politics and all that kind of stuff but
it is important it does matter I think it's not there are other things that need to be done
that are probably bigger in the long term but in the short term and it's also one of these things
where I think you know you have to you have to press all the buttons and hit all the levers that are
around and that's one of them that we have so anyway with that thank you for listening congrats again
Zijian and one thing this is the last thing I'm going to say I looked at the transcript that
I have a lot of generated from my last one and it always fucks up that Zijian Zijian is like
see you later basically in in Chinese it fucking pisses me off and I can't add my own transcripts
for some reason like it doesn't it doesn't accept my transcripts when I add them in I'm sure
it's something that I can work through and figure out but I have like a dozen other things I'm trying to
do it's not a really big high priority for me to get you know because the transcript is good enough
but it irritates me it's said bye bye at the end I didn't say fucking bye bye I said Zijian
so Zijian anyway sorry seriously thank you fuck Tim Cook

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smenor/tangentsBy Scott Menor, PhD