mattcheck retweeted
At this very moment
You are making a grave error.
You have been making it for years.
If you do not realize it
You will continue this error
Year after year.
You are paying a severe price for it.
But you will not realize the price
For years to come.
And the day you pay
You will desperately wish you could turn back the clock.
The desire to know what this error is
Is the practical and systematic journey
Of Truth.
mattcheck retweeted
"Only high-testosterone, high-IQ heterosexual males speak and act as a result of their mental model of the system as a whole. Everyone else just says and does whatever they think will keep them safe, and maybe get them a pat on the head."
These are the types of absolutist statements commonly written by people reliant on audience capture for a given trend.
It's not the type of thing that someone sophiscated enough to write Theft of Fire would likely write. If anything, it comes off as emotional and defensive.
A classic but tragic trend is to start with reasonable/broad statements and then shift toward more absolutist/narrow statements over time, which happens either because 1) someone is trying to corral people (a demagogue) or 2) because someone needs the money (which shouldn't inform their art, but does, which is an age-old issue with artists).
I'm looking forward to your next book and would encourage resistance against such banal and well-telegraphed failure modes that this type of direction tends to lead toward.
mattcheck retweeted
The most brilliant minds of my generation are thinking about how best to get people to click on advertisements.
mattcheck retweeted
If you’re trained in math or physics, you’re often prone to overestimate how well-understood the world is. You assume most things have been “worked out” mathematically to a far greater degree than they have been.
It can be shocking and slightly horrifying to realize how much of the world runs on vibes and rules of thumb. It seems impossible that things could keep running at all with so little theory.
This is the first step on the road to Hayekian wisdom, to realizing that most of the knowledge that runs the world exists in no individual human mind but rather in the interactions between them.
mattcheck retweeted
This isn't crazy at all, it's just outside of most people's experience.
You just have to supply the relevant information, so people can understand.
Here, I'll do it myself.
(You should pay me more for this.)
Picture a jar. Not a special jar that I have to explain to you. Just an ordinary jar.
Put some gold in it. Just a little bit, ground to the consistency of fine sand.
Now some iron.
And some uranium. Don't worry, it's not very radioactive in this state. You can touch it with your hands. Just pour it in.
Now some tungsten. Surprisingly heavy, huh?
Some platinum.
Then just keep adding other heavy elements. Sticking to the useful ones. Should be pretty easy. They're all useful for something.
Jar about half full? Now pour in some really fine sand. Put a lid on it.
Now shake the jar for 4 billion years. Don't worry, it's just an imaginary jar, and an imaginary 4 billion years, you're not going to get bored or anything.
Now reach your fingers into the jar, and fish out a nugget of gold, or tungsten, or iron.
Oh, wait. You can't. It's all at the bottom. Under a thick layer of sand.
Can you picture it? Are you picturing it clearly? Close your eyes if it helps. Wait, no, open them again so you can read this.
That jar is Earth.
All the heavy stuff has sunk to the core. Where you can't get it.
Now smash the jar on the floor, and pick up the precious metals and the useful ones.... easy, right?
The smashed jar is asteroids.
Right now, your brain is saying "Oh, I see, he's talking about asteroid mining. He's saying we're going to go out and mine asteroids."
No.
I'm saying we already are.
When the Earth was molten, all the heavy stuff sunk to the core. We covered this. So how are we mining heavy stuff on Earth right now?
The answer is that we are mining asteroids.
We are mining asteroids that hit the Earth after it stopped being molten. So the stuff in them stayed on the surface. Pretty much every mine on Earth is an ancient asteroid strike.
Now think of all the asteroids in the solar system. Divide them into two categories.
The first category is the ones that have already hit Earth, sometime in the past.
The second category is the ones that haven't.
I'll save you the trouble of asking an AI. The first category is about .001%. The second is about 99.999%.
Everything you have, everything you own, everything you ever made, everything that your entire civilization is made out of, unless it's made of wood or entirely out of light elements.... it all comes from that .001%.
The 99.999% is out there in the rest of the solar system.
Now do you understand?
You, and I, and Elon Musk, and your sweet old granny, all of us, we grew up under conditions of grinding material poverty. We just don't see it that way because we have nothing else to compare it to.
We're used to it.
Are you starting to get the idea? Good, but we're not done yet. Now we're gonna talk about energy.
Here on Earth, we pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them for energy. We could build fission reactors, but dumbass hippies made some movies, and now the retarded theater kids who run our government won't let us do that. They want us to go back to windmills, because they are retarded.
Windmills suck. Hell, even hydrocarbons suck. Fission is okayish, but the real energy source, the only one that matters in the long run, is hydrogen fusion.
On Earth, we can't really build fusion reactors that actually produce energy, despite the best efforts of engineers. That's not because the engineers are dumbasses like the theater kids. No, engineers are smart. They still can't do it because it's really really hard, unlike running a government.
Perhaps someday they'll succeed, but in the meantime, we're stuck burning hydrocarbons, until we hang all the theater kids and build fission plants instead.
But in space, there's a giant free fusion reactor waiting for us. In fact, we've been using it for millions of years. We call it the "sun".
In space, energy is free.
Oh, you have to invest in some solar panels, and they're only useful close to a star, but that's just nitpicky little details. Basic idea is that there's no power bill.
Build solar panels once, run 'em almost forever. On Earth, solar panels suck, and they're only useful for grid independence.
But in space, with nothing between you and the star but, well, space, then solar panels are awesome. And all the material and energy you need to build them is right there for the taking.
So, cheap material, free energy.
What else does a civilization need?
Computation? Well, guess what you can build a lot of with cheap material and free energy.
What this really all boils down to is that the only thing Earth has going for it is that it's a really nice place to build your house.
It's a crappy place to build a mine or factory.
The total value of everything off Earth — and I'm just talking about the solar system, not the rest of the universe — exceeds the total value of everything on the Earth by eleventy-billion percent.
In the future, most of us will continue to live on Earth, unless we really screw it up by not hanging all the theater kids. But all the mining, all the manufacturing, all the making the stuff, and all the making the stuff that makes the stuff, will happen in space.
And there will be a lot more of it.
All we have to do is get the tools we need from down here where we built them, to up there where we need them. So that we can build more tools out there, more and more and more of them, forever.
There's only one snag.
It's really hard to get things off Earth. We haven't really done much of it until very very recently.
SpaceX is the "very, very recently". SpaceX now owns about 80% of humanity's lift-to-space capacity, and no one else is even close.
That's 80% of the pipeline to infinite wealth. And first dibs on all the real estate out there, too.
In the old West, the railroads were money trees, because they didn't just own the transport, they owned the destination.
And there's about to be a frontier again, except this one's bigger, and it comes with a built-in second industrial revolution.
Make sense now?
mattcheck retweeted
i'm tired boss. i've never felt more unc so i guess it's my job to say old-man stuff like this:
good is shockingly good and evil is shockingly evil. the distinction between them is shockingly consequential, not at all fake controlling bullshit, in extremity a matter of life and death. if you are lucky, the first time you learn this the blast radius won't be too large. you were supposed to learn these things from your elders and betters but for too many of us the chains of lineage have been broken and so we had to figure and are figuring this stuff out ourselves, the hard way. it is worth your life and your soul, it is worth the lives and the souls of your loved ones, to earnestly cultivate a love for the good in yourself and others, and to seek out those who have done and are doing the same as companions
mattcheck retweeted
Humans are the only species that can create our own supernormal stimuli, and that’s why our collective trajectory is a dissolution into abstractness and absurdity (i.e. fakeness and gayness). We’re creating a world in the image of the off-manifold parts of our minds
mattcheck retweeted
This is the most remarkable story Ray Bradbury ever shared with me. He told it late at nigh, sitting in his den of antiquities and mementos. Take five minutes to read this. It’s pure magic.
#Writing #Living #Creativity #RayBradbury #Book
mattcheck retweeted
The degree to which people believe this can’t possibly result from coherent statistical prediction, absent the arising of some magical machine consciousness that contradicts the nature of the machine itself, provides a good proxy for how deeply they’d considered the structure and size of possibility space prior to engaging with these tools.
Also, these computational processes are definitionally and transparently understood as stochastic token predictors, so it’s more than a bit odd when people forget that fact because an output overwhelms their own intuition with respect to the nature of such a process’s capabilities.
The capacity to coherently traverse high dimensional spaces makes a model sentient no more than the capacity of a submarine to transit an ocean makes it a whale. We collapse such differences at the cost of deeper comprehension.
Ultimately, we have not adapted to meaningfully interact with holographic compressions over all of humanity’s creative artifacts, and it shows.
mattcheck retweeted
For momentary distaste of our spiritual engine's fumes, the West tossed it from the moving memetic vehicle.
We continued to pat ourselves on the back for centuries, given the vehicle first slowed at an intra-generationally imperceptible rate.
But our spiritual slowdown and its culturally enervating consequences became more and more obvious the further we rolled from the engine's resting place––until its absence loomed, undeniable, yet impossibly painful to admit.
mattcheck retweeted
The quickest way to lose your republic is to convince the public that every grievance requires a “government solution.”
mattcheck retweeted
Once severed from the Transcendent, the only phenomenologically available eschatologies lie downstream neurotic fixations upon finite ends.
Apocalypticism is tightly correlated with nihilism, I think. The end becomes your only sense of purpose, even if it’s an end you fear and don’t want.
The question isn’t so much how would you live your life knowing the world is coming to end. The harder question is how should you live it knowing that it won’t.
mattcheck retweeted
It is darkly humorous to me how few Westerners yet recognize, after the magnitude and multitude of 21st century object lessons, that nominal representative governance guarantees psyops will constitute the memetic water in which we swim.
mattcheck retweeted
We thought we were being clever we all remember it .
Ship the ugly work overseas, keep design and finance at home, and call the cheaper economy efficiency . For a long time it looked like one.
It was a 21 st century tulip mania field by economic morons who inhabited the central banks
The problem is the step after the mine. Chile and the Congo can pull copper out of the ground all day.
If the concentrate has to go to someone else’s refinery, they decide when it comes back as metal you can actually use.
Same story with magnets, foil, and the sulphuric acid that copper leach pads run on.
Miss a shipment and a mine has a bad year. Nobody fires a shot the west loses the war it didn’t know it was fighting .
From finding ore to pouring metal runs the better part of two decades, longer here.
The big Chilean pit that used to grade around two percent is heading for well below half that, which means more rock, more power, more water, for less metal.
You can’t legislate a deposit into existence.
So the West is already in an economic fight for its literal existence as free nations . A motor plant waits on a magnet. A substation waits on a transformer. The data-center people have capital and no timeline they can trust. Defense buyers discover that spec foil is not a commodity you grab off a screen.
Friends start bidding against friends for whatever cathode isn’t spoken for.
Steel and diesel and fertilizer still do most of the heavy lifting. Copper is just where the shortage showed up first, because everything we say we want to build drinks electricity.
A country that sells ore and imports the finished piece is not “post-industrial.” It is dependent, it wakes up conquered and it will spend the next twenty years arguing about rationing instead of building the furnaces it decided were inefficient to own.
Thanks to the plugged-in folks at Bloomberg for giving me the chance to ring some alarm bells that I think everyone needs to hear:
“We are really looking at the weaponization of certain critical raw materials in the supply chain and it's really a profound national security interest,” I told Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on their Odd Lots podcast. “And the metals we need to do something about that are the same metals that are needed for drone warfare or the defense from drone warfare. So we're seeing a sort of perfect storm in a balkanized world economy where demand for certain critical metals is going to infinity.”
“We need to mine as much copper in the next 18 years as we did in the last 10,000 years, just to maintain global 3% GDP growth without the electrification of the world economy…In the last 30 years, all the capital on Wall Street went into sexy technology like the Internet and broadband and Netflix and wireless but when all the money goes in that direction, we didn't put money into basic raw materials, which are the foundation on which everything sits.”
Huge thanks to @bloomberg’s hugely talented @TheStalwart, @TracyAlloway, @kevlloydlozano, @carmenarmen, Cale Brooks and of course the one and only @ryanchilcote for making it all happen.
For more about how we got here and how, maybe, foresight and better technology can help us find our way out, listen to the episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify, youtube or at:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
@IvanhoeMines_ @ivanhoeelectric @SunriseMetals @IPulseGroup @IvanhoeAtlantic @bluesparkenergy
mattcheck retweeted
Our centers of business and political power have nurtured the skin suit of Libertinism in place of the Virtue of Liberty, given Liberty’s responsibilities imply forms of self-restraint inconvenient to both wanton consumption and populist enthusiasm.
You’re unable to view this Post because this account owner limits who can view their Posts. Learn more