I’ve wrestled with this idea since reading My Side of The Mountain when I was quite young. Our society and culture constantly reinforces the perceived need to make enough money to retire one day, assuming that there is a necessary amount of money one needs to continue living and that one should stop working at some point. The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe and be able to live a long health life. My rampant consumption and desire to live a “full” life, like those that I see posted on social media, also stoke this financial insecurity mindset—“I must have more so that I can do more so that people will know that I am fulfilled and then I will feel happy and fulfilled.”
> The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe
It wasn't an accident. Near as I can tell there is a not-insignificant part of the American psychological context that amounts to a threat of utter destitution should you not choose to keep slaving away. By Krom, America needs homeless people to show you just how far you can fall unless you keep serving the man.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that if I want to leave any inheritance at all I will need to be voluntarily turning down medical care at some point in my life. I'm only 30 and I know for certain that lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
That's definitely true, and I think it's good you realize it so young.
It's inherent because of the diminishing returns for aggressive healthcare intervention. We're all going to die. We could ramp up the costs of intervention to arbitrary levels in a final death spasm, but we will still die. So, we have to strike some kind of balance.
The harder part, I think, is thinking about the decades leading up to that final end game. How do you trade off quality of life in different decades by saving and time-shifting some of your spending power into the future. It's not just medical costs but all the other aspects of life which carry a mix of predictable and unpredictable costs.
I hope to solve it through the healthy lifestyle: diet, exercises, sleep, outdoor time, stress management, so I will be healthy and active for a long time until some organ suddenly fails, so I won't spend money on medical care which observes my slowly fading body while giving some not necessary helpful treatment.
Turning down medical care at some point in your life maybe the right thing to do.
I bet if you were to ask most doctors, one of the most heartwrenching things they are required to do is keep people alive and in pain long past the point of compassion.
I am not advocating for euthanasia, but within the last 2 years I have observed such cruelty only once averted
> lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
Fortunately, the 2 are often correlated, the best ways to prepare for a long lifespan are the same as preparing for a long health span, and that includes a high quality of life.
True, and that's why I wish there was a greater focus on preventative care in the US. Takes a lot of motivation to get a physical when things are mostly fine.
I'm working on the habits I have most direct control over: healthy eating, cardio exercise and reducing stress.
Most people agree with you until the moment they actually have to decide between further treatment and likely death. Most people simply hold on until they have no choice but to die.
To be fair, the gene also repairs heart damage in Zebrafish
which is more than just "in mice".
I understand the reasons behind the meme "in mice",
but on the other hand dismissing valid progress because
humans reflexively insisting on exceptional snowflake status
is counterproductive.
Plus, the jumo from zebrafish to mice is a lot larger than the jump from mice to humans. If it still functions across that large of a jump then it's very likely it'll also work in humans.
Kind of makes you wonder what kind of biotechnology we could build if we didn't care about all that. There would be some pretty gnarly human suffering, but imagine if biological technology could progress at the same rate as electronics.
Morally abhorrent, of course, but there would be some benefits...
How easy are zebrafish to raise? What is their lifecycle? Can I raise millions of them in my basement or will I need to buy some warehouse? How long do they take? What do they eat? Any venture capitalists willing to fund my next business?
zebrafish are trivial, they are basically tropical fish that were repurposed for scientific research. temperature, ph, feeding, and cleaning the tank are the key steps.
Maintaining a population of zebrafish for scientific research is a bit more challenging; you need to maintain a continuous environment, adhere to a protocol, etc, to reduce all the variables that would your make your research results less reproducible.
zebrafish are imho one of the truly great model organisms- more interesting to work with and more convenient for many things. If I hadn't picked tardigrades for my microscopy/computer vision projects, I would have gone with zebrafish.
It's a common model organism in biology. One of the reasons is that it's easy to breed and keep in labs with fairly quick lifecycles. Raising millions of them is probably going to require a warehouse just like it would take to raise a million mice.
This is pretty interesting but it seems like there’s a massive component of this system that is yet to be proven viable—from the article:
“Drilling a hole is challenging enough,” says Tester. “But actually running the reservoir and getting the energy out of the ground safely may be something very, very far off in the future.”
Is there any existing +3km deep geothermal well energy system in use?
Fervo Energy is making great progress in this area. They've drilled a injector/producer pair, frac'd between them (exactly like oil/gas), and pump water at ~60 L/s. Whatever goes into the injector comes out the producer a few hours later much hotter. Their proof of concept produces 3 MW, and uses ~1MW to power the injection pumps. They are doing a full scale plant in Utah now, and expect ~8 MW net for each injector/producer pair.
3km would be far below average for new oil and gas wells in America. Climate change sucks but the technology for punching holes in the ground with extreme aspect ratios is really cool. A reason I am more interested in geothermal than nuclear for "base load" generation is because geothermal can reuse our existing drilling technology and workforce.
Yeah, and think about the amount of political support you could get for geothermal projects if workers from the oil and gas sector could see a clear and easy path to adapt their skills.
Globally viable geothermal power generation would be an absolute game changer for fighting climate change. It doesn’t have to be better than nuclear. If it’s even close to being as good, the benefits of getting ex oil/gas people/companies on board would more than outweigh the difference. The growth rate could potentially hit levels that make a substantial impact on climate change within a decade of the initial ramp.
Geo would make a good transition project for the drilling side of the business.
It's counter intuitive but if we did move that way we need a LOT more petro infrastructure going forward. And without irony it would be better for us.
Capturing all the wasted natural gas (that gets flared off) as a reorient to maintain existing wells lowers carbon foot print and makes the use of gas less attractive due to cost.
Petrochemical products aren't going away any time soon. Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like lubricants. Having useful plastics (because there are tons of medical uses). And we're not getting rid of fertilizer (cause feeding 8 billion people is hard).
There are reasons to keep the drilling side and the current matinence side around doing what they do today while lowering carbon foot print.
> Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like lubricants. Having useful plastics
We know how to make both from many other process. PLA plastic (commonly used for 3d printing) is commercially made from plant sources as well (I wasn't able to find a source for if it all is or just some). There are plant based oils that are biodegradable that you could put into any transmission today (meet OEM requirements) - they cost about 6x what regular oil costs though. If that isn't good enough the process to make synthetic oil just need carbon (ideally in the form of CO, but we could use CO2), water, and energy and from there we can engineer any hydrocarbon you want - again at much high cost.
Pumping oil from the ground is cheap though, so it is hard to compete with something else. We know how to do it though. If you are a chemical engineer there is a lot of money in reducing costs (though I'm not making any claim this is possible, only if you can there is money)
"Synthetic oil is a lubricant consisting of chemical compounds that are artificially modified or synthesised. Synthetic lubricants can be manufactured using chemically modified petroleum components rather than whole crude oil, but can also be synthesized from other raw materials. The base material, however, is still overwhelmingly crude oil that is distilled and then modified physically and chemically. The actual synthesis process and composition of additives is generally a commercial trade secret and will vary among producers."
Polyalphaolefins (PAOs), the most common synthetic oil, are produced from ethylene. In the US, this overwhelmingly means being produced from natural gas, as US fracked gas is rich in ethane, the feedstock for ethylene production.
Utah FORGE is the deepest I'm aware of: https://utahforge.com/project-research. Well 58-32 goes to 2.2km. 78B-32 goes to 2.9km. 16B(78)-32 appears to break 3km.
But FORGE is mostly based around research, from what I understand, rather than rolling out broad-based commercial geothermal.
In my experience, Dark UX is often a symptom of a myopic, revenue-focused product team. Tricking users with dark UX patterns will almost always have a more profoundly negative effect on the company’s revenue in the long term than whatever the incremental, short term gain may be. I work for a DTC company as a FE engineer and I’m frequently having to try convince product people that implementing & maintaining dark UX patterns erodes our users’ trust in us and puts more of a burden on our customer experience team.
Dissecting the event handling of Feedly’s UI isn’t revealing the crux of the issue here. Engineers (in my experience) want to build things that provide a respectful user experience, things that they themselves would not be frustrated using. I absolutely despise seeing these types of dark patterns in the wild. I would be surprised if an engineer suggested this Feedly feature. But maybe I’m more sensitive to Dark UX than most and as a result have a more aggressive hatred for it in my work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it has to be some kind of ethical void in the brain of decisionmakers who think they can trick their customers into paying them. Some kind of perverse manufactured business survival tactic driving their "close at any cost" mentality.
"contemplate how that spider you can see in the corner when youre on the toilet, can survive so long without any critters in her web?"
"spend ten minutes attempting to come up with a name for your dying plant, because if you just remember to talk to it - it wont leave you like everyone else has"
"Promise yourself youll fold the laundry after you rest your eyes for a few minutes"
This seems akin to trying to change our nations attitude towards guns and semi automatic weapons instead of improving gun control legislation. According to the 2020 figures in the article > 10,000 people are dying every year from alcohol-related accidents. If there’s something tangible that can be done to reduce that death count, I’m all for it. As wonderful as it would be to reform the national attitude towards alcohol and excessive drinking, the alcohol lobby and our stubbornness as a culture would probably make it very challenging to effect any meaningful change. It’ll be interesting to see how far this gets from a technical standpoint and, if it does actually make it into new vehicles, how many work-arounds people come up with.
Psilocybin is still something that can be grown/synthesized outside of a lab. Sure, major pharmaceutical companies could synthesize pure psilocybin and sell that as a new treatment in some kind of ideal form but it seem that from a lot of anecdotes posted here as well as many other stories I’ve heard, “normal”, non-lab-produced psilocybe mushrooms can have a profiundly positive effect. This might be what big pharma is seeing as a potential opportunity loss and therefore funding studies that skew results in a less positive way.
The issue is that your doctor can't write a prescription for the mushrooms themselves, so those aren't likely to become a mainstream treatment.
The more likely outcome is that the industry will create a synthetic analogue of psilocybin, conduct the trials needed to get it FDA-approved as a depression treatment, and then market it widely, making it more readily available and widely known than psilocybin itself.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing: such an analogue might (say) have fewer side effects or work more reliably. But it will result in the pharmaceutical industry getting the bulk of the profits.
