An increasing number of people, myself included, would take out loans to buy the dip if it ever even got down to 10k. It's just fundamentally better than gold and fiat.

Could someone create identical questions for Mariupol, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson?

@(JonathanRay) addendum: If there is nanotech, it'll probably be more like artificial organic life, and use similar replication methods. But then to get a Yes probability we have to answer why natural bacteria haven't already turned the earth into grey goo, but artificial bacteria can. What extra capabilities could the artificial bacteria have? Certainly not the ability to rapidly metabolize everything around them -- natural bacteria have been trying to evolve that in a massively parallel way for billions of years. Also I'm curious where we draw th...

* Chinese labs accidentally leaked SARS 1 several times previously * The wet market origin is false because the first known cases were not associated with the wet market and predated the wet market outbreak by many weeks. * Horseshoe bats don't even live within a hundreds of miles radius of Wuhan * The CCP ordered destruction of evidence and samples at the wuhan institute of virology, and therefore probably had something to hide. I'd put a >50% probability that it escaped the lab but a low probability of the masses ever being convinced of it. The po...

New Elon interview on 12/28 says "best case 5 years, worst case 10 years".

He's in the best position to know, but tends to predict shorter timelines than what actually happens. So I'm just going to take his prediction and fudge it upward a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxREm3s1scA

currently 34% on at least 1 detonation in war by 2050: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4779/at-l…

But only 8% here. That delta seems too optimistic about the odds of preventing escalation.

I'm updating 76% to 99% now that I saw the leaked bodycam.

Floyd was already saying "I can't breathe" when he was just sitting in the back seat of the car, before he came out the other side of it. This corroborates the autopsy that found severe heart disease & no damage to the neck. This is way more than a reasonable doubt.

Summary of what happened: Drugs + Ideology -> inability to follow basic instructions -> escalation -> panic attack -> heart attack. The knee was a red herring.

At a party, yudkowsky said “one minus epsilon”, but not sure how serious he was

An astrophysicist blogged a "debunking" of Wade's article on Forbes, but it sucks. It pretends there's no such thing as testing on cell cultures and humanized mice. It pretends no one could have predicted that any particular modification would make a virus more virulent before massive testing in live humans, despite the fact that adding furin cleavage sites to make viruses more virulent is routine in gain of function research. It ignores the entire documented history of WIV scientists doing reckless gain of function research in low-security BSL2 condi...

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of… This is a very excellent and comprehensive article about the origin of COVID by Nicholas Wade, IMO the greatest living science journalist. Taken together, all the evidence in the article makes it fair to assign at least a 90% probability to the lab origin.

@(Sergio) This looks like a theranos-tier scam. Using carbon nanotubes to separate alcohols from water seems farfetched. Electrolysis having high enough efficiency to be viable seems farfetched. The electricity necessary to electrolyze the CO2 from a power plant would be an order of magnitude more than the electricity produced by the same power plant. One would be way better off putting that solar/wind power directly onto the grid to substitute for fossil plants, and building pumped hydropower storage which has a round trip efficiency of 80% and a c...

Compare to: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7207/bitcoin-to-fall-to-near-zero-by-2121/ That's predicting a 60% chance bitcoin falls to $10 by 2121. This question is predicting a 50% chance bitcoin rises to $1,000,000 by 2085. These aren't directly contradictory, but they don't seem consistent. I think the former is 60x too high and the latter is slightly too low. Conservatively assume 2% inflation plus 2% world real gdp growth (or any combination thereof that sums to 4%). 1.04^59=10.11. So bitcoin doesn't even have to gain any market share...

Pretty high if an AGI started the nuclear war on purpose or if the war escalates to using artificial pandemics to genocide each other. Very low if just nukes, because of mineshaft people.

@alwaysrinse It played a huge role in the Arab Spring, which spawned several civil wars: Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen.

"Resolution will be positive if in the context of armed conflict:

Three countries each detonate at least 10 nuclear devices of at least 10 kiloton yield outside of their own territory in OR

Two countries each detonate at least 50 nuclear devices of at least 10 kiloton yield outside of their own territory."

What about tests and saber-rattling in international waters or disputed waters like the South China Sea, in the context of international conflict but without actually using the nukes on people?

I expect a reversal of the sudden jump from 1.7 in 2019 to 1.3 in 2020 (blame covid). After that I expect it to hold around 1.7 due to CPC interventions. China has smart people studying the problem, and has more tools at their disposal to deal with it than any of the western democracies. If the CPC wants, it can tell women to take a gap decade before entering university, so that the three children are all old enough for primary school before the mother enters university. It can propagandize for grandparents financially supporting this. Lengthening...

@JonathanRay re-updating to a median of Jan 20 because I found newer data here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/cou…

The overall number of cases in south africa is rising much faster than it ever did before.

@johnnycaffeine Thank you for convincing me that there is plenty of room for Russia's sanctions to get worse. This could be a credible deterrent if Putin were homo economicus trying to maximize GDP, but I'm not sure what his motivations are. Why wasn't the expectation of sanctions enough to deter him in 2014, and what's different this time?

Do extremely low yield improvised nukes count? e.g. natural uranium deuteride could be used to make a very weak bomb with far fewer resources than the Manhattan project. The US tested a similar device in 1953 with a yield of 0.2kt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hydride_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Upsho…

I propose to edit the question to have a threshold of 1 kiloton, because this is a very noncentral example of a nuclear detonation.

quoting wikipedia on Mississippi: "In March 2018, the Mississippi House passed House Bill 1510, the Gestational Age Act, that outlawed abortion after 15 weeks "except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality".[31][32] The Gestational Age Act does not allow exemptions in cases of rape or incest.[32] " But because the penalties are professional sanctions and civil penalties, instead of criminal penalties, it doesn't meet any of the resolution criteria. The MS law is making a slightly different tradeoff and setting slightly di...