• 2 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Some good news:

    • emission rates have plateaued; we are still destroying the planet, but no longer accelerating the rate at which we do it
    • Solar panels (unsubsidized) are the cheapest method of electricity generation as of 2022
    • there is a fundamentally limited amount of fossil fuels, so as long as we don’t turn to Venus 2.0 by 2100 we will deplete most coal and oil and it will be possible for our ancestors to repair the planet over the following centuries.

    Yeah I know even this “good news” is bleak, but it’s worth celebrating. There is some hope.





  • An infinitely growing blockchain will inevitably fail by centralizing. Crypto-currencies as they exist today are doomed, but the protocols and tech created now may hopefully inform the design of something that is useful as a currency.

    Also, high transaction fees make it useless for small (normal, everyday) amounts, so it can only be used as a store of value. It’s really more analogous to gold or a stock, with the one significant benefit that it’s harder to steal than gold and can’t be lost stolen institutionally.






  • I’m always wondering is how I became an independent thinker. I have a hard time understanding how so many people are so gullible

    You may not think this way, but I’ll comment just in case: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are too smart to fall for a lie. The smartest people in the world have blind spots, and only the blind think they have none.





  • My wild speculation:

    Viral snares/traps? Semi-permeable membrane + RNA; the virus gets in and binds to the RNA inside, then the viral package is “spent” on fake RNA that can’t replicate. The MVP shell could keep regular cellular machinery away from the trap RNA. There are thousands of these vaults within the cell, as to create a bunch of “pits” that a virus could fall into, thus effectively slowing viral spread, even a little?

    edit: from a link in the article:

    vault protein somehow helps epithelial cells internalize P. aeruginosa, which in turn speeds the clearance of an infection. Compared to normal mice, for example, MVP-less mice were 3 times as likely to die when their lungs were infected with the bacterium

    This was mentioned as a hypothesis that was determined to be fruitless. Was this ever explored further? Different viruses, organ systems, etc.? Since it’s in a lot of different organisms, maybe some common virus that affects many different species is affected by this.

    This is very interesting.