Two boys die in "ebike" accident: Cardiff riot broke out after 'police prevented parents seeing fatal crash victims', close relative says

[Woosh]

they are right to be worried. I was given a test account on Adobe Firefly last month. Apparently, Nvidia is going to do even better and faster this year. AI is now trained to think like humans. It used to be trained on outcome reward, now each step in the process is given points, so AI learns to be logical and most efficient each step all the way. The rate of increase in 'intelligence' is truly exponential. I used to think that AI/robots will take 1 job out of 3 but now, probably 3 jobs out of 5. When AI can program itself completely, humans are doomed.

 

[guerney]

 

[flecc]

However, as a major life plus, I did recently redeem my mortgage, so now 100% own the house I live in.

That's good to learn, it's something I did twice over thanks to some good fortune. Coming out of the army at 24 and with plenty of savings I wasn't ready to settle down and didn't know where I would yet. My parents had never been well off and were renting at a time of worrying rapid rent increases and my father was already to old to get a full term mortgage.

So simple solution, I told them to go out a choose a nice home and I'd buy it so they could live there free for the rest of their life, with it forming an investment for me in my eventual retirement. I bought their choice on a mortgage with a 37% deposit and meanwhile I rented elsewhere until six years later when I was able to buy a home for myself with a 95% mortgage.

The combination of high wage inflation and two jobs in a row carrying substantial performance related annual bonuses meant I was able to pour money into clearing their home's 25 year mortage in just 15 years, something permitted without penalty by building societies in those days. Then by switching all those payments to my home's mortgage that was cleared in just two further years, 11 years in all,

But as said, not all skill, there was a lot of luck involved in both those and my early retirement. High wage inflation at exactly the right times. Being able to pay off mortgages very early without penalty back then. The ability to earn very large annual bonuses. Thatcher's stupidity in creating very high inflation that earned me an average of 15% per annum on three large government bonds for 13 years.
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[flecc]

I used to think that AI/robots will take 1 job out of 3 but now, probably 3 jobs out of 5. When AI can program itself completely, humans are doomed.

That's the best possible outcome and good news in my view. I've long maintained that the human race is a disease fulfilling all the conditions for that designation. Particularly that of infecting to an overwhelming degree its host, planet earth, to the point of its own eventual destruction.

Our early demise would save biological life on this planet.
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[Deleted member 16246]

Flecc said:

"Thatcher's stupidity in creating very high inflation that earned me an average of 15% per annum on three large government bonds for 13 years."

I don't think that is very fair, or even true. I well remember inflation being at 28% during the mid 1970s when Labour was in power. I think it was under James Calaghan. Following him we had Thatcher who certainly made mistakes, but eventually dragged down inflation. It was pretty hard as we had a wage price spiral which kept it going even when the original cause - the massive rise in oil prices had long gone.

We may yet see a similar turn of events as the hydrocarbon price shock subsides and quasi nationalised employees keep on demanding replacement of their buying power. We are basically in a war right now and no one can expect their wage to buy what it used to do. If that doesn't stop, the only way out of high inflation will be a massive recession as happened in the 1980s.

 

[Deleted member 16246]

That's the best possible outcome and good news in my view. I've long maintained that the human race is a disease fulfilling all the conditions for that designation. Particularly that of infecting to an overwhelming degree its host, planet earth, to the point of its own eventual destruction.

Our early demise would save biological life on this planet.
.

We are just animals like any other on the planet and we expand our numbers and our territorial reach just like them until we come up against resource constraints. If we change our environment in unfavourable ways, or come up against a competing species, conditions will no longer favour us and we will contract in numbers - perhaps drastically. The same goes for all creatures and I would suggest, looking far away, it will be true on any planet where life exists, whatever it is like. The force of natural selection will I think, be a universal law, and will effect alien life as it does us.

Biological life will continue here, as has always been the case, species rise and fall and are always replaced by other kinds of life which are better suited to the ever changing environment. In the last 500 million years, the planet has been far hotter than now for at least 300 million of those years.

Tales of the an impending end of life are ridiculous hyperbolic nonsense peddled by fools. This graph was produced by NOAA the American governmental climate body. We are living in an inter-glacial cool period right now, and the planet is recovering from the last ice age.

What's the hottest Earth's ever been?

Earth’s hottest periods occurred before humans existed. Those ancient climates would have been like nothing our species has ever seen.

www.climate.gov

 

[saneagle]

Absolutely not! If you had read what He had said you would know that. But instead you make a fool of yourself by comparing Jesus, someone you obviously know nothing about to someone who is clearly a nasty piece of work.

I have never met Andrew Tate, but I have seen enough of the kind of toxic nonsense he has published of himself in videos on social media etc. He has not apologised for any of this, or even said "it was all fake, that wasn't me, I'm not like that, I don't believe people should act that way". So I can only conclude that that is the kind of person he wants to be seen as and a form of behaviour he believes to be appropriate in the 21st century.

By the nonsense you have posted in this thread you have completely undermined your credibility.

Again, you're adjusting facts to suit your own false perception of reality. Of course you don't need to study facts because in your false reality, you already have the picture.

I didn't say Andrew Tate was Jesus, nor the son of God or anything like that. I drew comparisons between their situations. The main point being that both had many followers, who liked what they said and were unpopular with the ruling classes, so they were both persecuted.

I expect you'll be watching the BBC cut and shut version of the interview to reinforce your unreality.

The interview was quite interesting. In a normal one, I would have expected questions from the BBC like:
How is it inside a Romanian jail?
Are they treating it well?
How long do you expect to be under house arrest?
Will you be able to prove your innocence?
Have they said whether or when they're going to charge you?
Are you able to communicate with your family and friends?
Etc.

Instead, from beginning to end, the BBC were extremely aggressive, like they hated him or they were the prosecuting police representative trying to trick him into saying something they could use as evidence of guilt. What does that tell you? The BBC are supposed to be independent to present normal people true facts, not prosecute people.

You should compare that interview with the Philip Shofield one, the guy who was kicked off TV under the aspersions of having groomed and had an affair with an underage boy. They were extremely sympathetic and calm, asking him questions as if they were his best friend, and they completely avoided the obvious questions, which I can't mention here, but I'm sure that you know what they are.

 

[flecc]

I don't think that is very fair, or even true. I well remember inflation being at 28% during the mid 1970s when Labour was in power. I think it was under James Calaghan. Following him we had Thatcher who certainly made mistakes, but eventually dragged down inflation.

What I posted was very true and I'm afraid you are a bit out of sequence. Callaghan had become a figurehead since the IMF were running our economy as a condition of bailing us out, so effectively Thatcher took over from what they did. She did in fact initially very rapidly reduce inflation for a while then, but I was posting about much later in the Nigel Lawson days. Quote on interest rates then:

"By the time Lawson resigned in October 1989 after a clash with Thatcher and her economic adviser, Alan Walters, over the chancellor’s exchange rate strategy, they had doubled to 15% and a deep recession was baked in."

It was on those inflationary interest rates that I made bond money through to beyond the millennium.

Thatcher's foolishness was to appoint a chancellor and then have an opposing personal advisor publically undermining him, about as daft a way of running the economy possible.
.

 

[flecc]

We are just animals like any other on the planet and we expand our numbers and our territorial reach just like them until we come up against resource constraints. If we change our environment in unfavourable ways, or come up against a competing species, conditions will no longer favour us and we will contract in numbers - perhaps drastically. The same goes for all creatures and I would suggest, looking far away, it will be true on any planet where life exists, whatever it is like. The force of natural selection will I think, be a universal law, and will effect alien life as it does us.

Biological life will continue here, as has always been the case, species rise and fall and are always replaced by other kinds of life which are better suited to the ever changing environment. In the last 500 million years, the planet has been far hotter than now for at least 300 million of those years.

Tales of the an impending end of life are ridiculous hyperbolic nonsense peddled by fools. This graph was produced by NOAA the American governmental climate body. We are living in an inter-glacial cool period right now, and the planet is recovering from the last ice age.

What's the hottest Earth's ever been?

Earth’s hottest periods occurred before humans existed. Those ancient climates would have been like nothing our species has ever seen.

www.climate.gov

View attachment 51917

Your reply inadvertantly takes advantage of my shorthand, I was not forecasting the sudden end of all biological life of course. My final line:

"Our early demise would save biological life on this planet."

Would better have been expressed as:

"Our early demise would save much other biological life on this planet."

But it is not just a matter of resources as you seem to think, our scientific advances cause damage going far beyond that, into altering the fundamentals that made life possible here in the first instance.

The graph you publish makes that point, showing how unstable and finely balanced this planet's situation is and how little is necessary to tip it over the edge into the biologically absent state of the vast majority of planets in our universe.

It isn't foolish to make that point.

It is perhaps foolish of the graph's authors not to add the old maxim, "Past performance is not necessarily an indication of future trends".
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[Deleted member 16246]

My remarks on climate catastrophism went beyond what you had said, so I did not intend that all of my remarks be thought to apply to your comments.

Interestingly, although it is undeniable that co2 increases will lead to some degree of warming ( as they did in the past when those hot periods were shown in the graph) CO2 levels are still at a trace level. We see huge angst about co2 levels changing in a couple of hundred years from 240 parts per million to 410 parts per million. On the face of it, it looks like a huge rise, but what we are really talking about in terms of overall co2 levels is that in 200 years, we have gone from one molecule of c02 to 4166 of atmosphere to an apparently horrendous level of one molecule of co2 in 2440 of atmosphere. Venus it is not.

Indeed, as far as claims of ending life on our planet which are always being made, greenhouse growers who produce our winter tomatoes and salad vegetables artificially raise the co2 levels to about three or four times our current supposedly 'horrific' co2 levels. They actually have machinery which burns gas to make extra co2 so they can produce more crops faster inside the greenhouses. Far from ending plant and animal life, more co2 will actually make more plant material (plants of course require co2 to perform photosynthesis and fix carbon atoms into sugar molecules). The optimum level for maximum plant growth is between 1000 parts per million and 1300 parts per million. More plants means more food.

Does it mean that climate will alter what we grow where? Yes - it does. There has never been a time when people have not had to alter what they did because of changing natural forces over time. In the tenth century, the Danish / Icelandic viking settled Greenland and farmed animals and vegetables there. They lived there for about three hundred years and eventually left when it became too cold so that their farming life became impossible, as it is today.

 

[Woosh]

. If we change our environment in unfavourable ways, or come up against a competing species, conditions will no longer favour us and we will contract in numbers - perhaps drastically

I am not sure you are right on this. Our technological era started less than 500 years ago and look what we have done so far. I don't think temperature is a big issue. We don't need a million year to either to be wised up or wiped out. We can send humans to the moon and soon, to other worlds in the solar system. Just look at one of the possible solutions how to clear dust on a world without water: with liquefied air on Venus for example. Who would have thought that is possible 200 years ago? Chips created specifically for AI double in performance every 3 1/2 months. We can now train AI systems to GPT4 for under a tenner. It won't be long before AI can solve magnetic confimement in tokamaks then electricity will be so cheap and AI will really take off.

 

[Deleted member 16246]

I am not sure you are right on this. Our technological era started less than 500 years ago and look what we have done so far. I don't think temperature is a big issue. We don't need a million year to either to be wised up or wiped out. We can send humans to the moon and soon, to other worlds in the solar system. Just look at the possible solution how to clear dust: with liquefied air on Venus for example. Who would have thought that is possible 200 years ago? Chips created specifically for AI double in performance every 3 1/2 months. We can train AI systems to GPT4 for under a tenner now, it won't be long before AI can solve magnetic confimement in tokamaks then AI will really take off.

Respectfully - I think this is an absolute fantasy. We can not live on another planet without vast expenditure and incredibly complex technical solutions which in themselves are rife with the possibility of breaking down. A broken down motor on my ebike or one of my motorcycles is a damned nuisance, but broken down systems at a Mars base is a catastrophe. Space travel is an extraordinarily dangerous business and it always will be. Apart from the severe impact of low gravity on the health of human beings (skeletal and muscle wastage and eye damage) there are lethal levels of radiation in space. Mars is the only place outside the Earth / Moon system that we might feasibly place people, but it would I think be a suicide mission. Radiation levels are massive because Mars has no magnetic field - hence no protective magnetosphere. The sun frequently produces outbursts of lethal radiation. Mars has an atmosphere which is extremely thin and mostly co2. The surface pressure is only 2% of the pressure we evolved to live in. Mars average temperature is minus 65C, but it ranges from minus 128C to about 20c. Mostly though it is at the very low levels far below the coldest parts of Earth. Murderous, temperature, murderous levels of radiation, low gravity and very very little water. What water Mars had four billion years ago was lost along with its atmosphere when the interior of the planet cooled down and the generation of a magnetic field stopped. This allowed the relentless blast of solar wind to strip the atmosphere away to space and then to cause the oceans it had to evaporate away to space.

Frankly, I think anyone who thinks homo-sapiens is ever going to set off to planets new is living in delusion land. The cost of creating even a small Mars base for a handful of people would be absolutely massive.

Coronal mass ejection video:

 

[Woosh]

Respectfully - I think this is an absolute fantasy. We can not live on another planet without vast expenditure and incredibly complex technical solutions which in themselves are rife with the possibility of breaking down

I have been following space missions for decades and am well aware of all the difficulties, to the point that I could believe that the first moon landing was a hoax (flag fluttering on the surface of the moon and all that...).
Still, I believe that space mining is possible and perhaps we could colonise one of the six moons (Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune's).
70 years ago, we just discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
Now we can breakdown the whole genome for under £1,000.
I think you underestimate the ability of the human brain.

 

[flecc]

Frankly, I think anyone who thinks homo-sapiens is ever going to set off to planets new is living in delusion land.

Fully agreed, completely delusional, as is talk of our space travel. Going to the moon isn't space travel, it's metaphorically just going from the back door to the end of the garden. Similar is travelling anywhere in the solar system since it is a single locked together system.

Space begins beyond the solar system and no person has ever been there, or is likely to do so in any forseeable future. Long before we could get to that stage, a sixth mass extinction could end any such ambition.
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[Woosh]

Space begins beyond the solar system and no person has ever been there, or is likely to do so in any forseeable future. Long before we could get to that stage, a sixth mass extinction could end any such ambition.

Look at the progress in quantum physics since 1900s.
Moving our whole solar system to another part of our galaxy may be possible. All we need to to call up a black hole.

 

[Deleted member 16246]

Look at the progress in quantum physics since 1900s.
Moving our whole solar system to another part of our galaxy may be possible. All we need to to call up a black hole.

Ha ha ha ha .....

 

[flecc]

70 years ago, we just discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
Now we can breakdown the whole genome for under £1,000.
I think you underestimate the ability of the human brain.

But that is on small scales, something we are very good at. It's on the large scale that we fail due to our own fundamental size limitations. Far more important than nipping off to Mars is blocking the Bristol Channel at both the Atlantic entrance and part way in. Which with phased water transfers would give the whole country electricity 24/365 and even money earning energy exports. But we can't because we don't know how and are too scared to even attempt it.

Useful space travel is similar. Sure we can spend a few billions to send three men to Mars to six months later stay there a couple of days in space suits. There's even a faint possibility we could bring them back alive.

But giving Mars an atmosphere and populating it with enough human diversity to ensure continuance is another matter entirely.
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[flecc]

All we need is to call up a black hole.

Dead easy, our Chancellors of the Exchequer do it all the time.
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[Deleted member 16246]

Space begins beyond the solar system and no person has ever been there, or is likely to do so in any forseeable future. Long before we could get to that stage, a sixth mass extinction could end any such ambition.
.

The very fastest spacecraft to date would had it been sent to the nearest star to the sun, would take about 47,000 years to get there. If we somehow evolved technology that would allow us to get to ten times the speed of chemical rockets, it would still take as long as the time since the early periods of Ancient Egypt - before the Pyramids in fact. That is ten times what we can do today to the nearest star - the triple star system of the Alpha Centauri group.

Bearing in mind the age of our own species as distinct from the ape men hominids that went before, modern type humans are no more than 160,000 years old. The neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago. The journey times in inter-stellar space travel are extraordinary. To travel to the nearest galaxy outside our own (Andromeda) at current speeds would take 26 billion years - almost twice the age of the universe.

 

[Woosh]

people always say about nuclear fusion: it will be here in 30 years. However, it may this time:

Magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning | Nature

Basically, the main problem with tokamaks is how to confine the plasma continuously.
It's juggling the current in a lot control coils at the same time. Google DeepMind managed to hold the plasma stable for 2 seconds on its own. Don't laugh yet, the record on this kit (it's a variable control tokamak) by the engineers was 3 seconds before AI.
The current world record for stable plasma in a tokamak is 18 minutes held by the Chinese. Let's assume that AI advances about 100% every 4 months, it will be about 5 years when AI can do this.