Flying cars were always dangerous and impractical in the places where they’d be needed, but I’m already in line for an implant that didn’t used to exist. Cyberware is basically just that on an elective basis, right?

We have crypto, talking computers and warfare looks like this:

Next up I’m waiting on crowded street markets lit by signage, although the trend towards delivering everything makes me doubt.

The one trope that can’t happen is corporations as government. Executives are not warlords, even if they think they are. Actual authoritarian regimes always end up looking like each other, and not like Google.

What do you mean? Almost everyone wants more, and will gladly take it if they have an opportunity. That’s why lotteries exist, right?

Big history is full of open questions, but there’s counterexamples. Short-lived republics are a dime a dozen, while Egypt lasted for thousands of years. There are known cases where inequality actually increases with the end of an empire, like how Roman Britain with it’s public bathhouses directly gives way to dark ages Britain with feudal lords and manors. In some cases, a disenfranchised group getting a bit of power is destabilising.

I’ll admit, I only have a fuzzy understanding of even the basics of Hamiltonian mechanics. I understand quantum computing, though, and that evolution of a circuit is a unitary (linear) operator/matrix. So, wouldn’t continuous evolution be a one-parameter Lie subgroup of the unitary operators over your Hilbert space? Any eigenvalue would have to be a root of unity, with the exact one corresponding to rate of change in phase, because otherwise you end up with probabilities not summing to 1.

I think it would be analogous to the normal modes for a classical standing wave, which are also used as examples of an eigenfunction.

Maybe the more relevant question is if nonequilibrium, dynamical quantum systems can also be said to be quantised in the same way. Can they?

If the problem is easier to think about with a time-dependent Hamiltonian, you can use the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics, which makes the wavefunctions static and lets the operators evolve in time. This can be helpful in a number of situations—typically involving light.

That sounds wild!

What did they teach about the Trump stuff? A lot of things are happening, or not happening but widely believed to be happening, that aren’t supposed to. Did they discuss the possibility that traditional system of government might not survive?

Yeah, “people used to be better” has been a popular sentiment since Socrates, at least.

So, a timeframe isn’t given here, and it’s not even clear who’s being interviewed (Alain Herzog is the photographer), but it doesn’t sound too out there. That’s a 200% increase, given Switzerland’s current use, and it’s specifically renewable capacity to overcome variability. If you provide some kind of V2G or grid storage, or something more responsive like nuclear, that’s going to go down, because the figure is essentially what’s needed to avoid disruption on a hot day that’s also very cloudy.

it’s happening NOW.

Oh, so it’s over a moment from NOW?

Nah, it’s slowly and continuously happening. It has been for decades, although with greater rate as we’ve ignored it.

buildout all the grid you can, it won’t be enough for everyone, and when it collapses, everyone’s fucked.

We’ll need X amount of power. If the grid can supply that, we won’t directly cook. It’s more than now, but not massively more.

Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they regret that.

No u.

Yes, and there’s also bog or ice mummies that are preserved totally different ways. The Egyptian ones that are filled with preservatives and dehydrated probably do just need air that’s super dry.

Really? I was assuming you’d need pretty significant climate control. Although it probably varies by type.

I have seen mummies stored like under a bench FWIW.

Was that correct, or was that one of those OMG moments?

Ticks, you bet. Rainforests have massive biodiversity, and that includes the parasites. There’s even terrestrial leeches that will latch on to you!

Yes, I gather that Stalin was the iron fist type, rising though pure ruthlessness,

That gives him too much credit. Stalin was relatively inconsequential in the rise and initial rule of the Bolsheviks, which happened under Lenin with Trotsky as a strong second in command. He just managed to palace intrigue his way to the top after Lenin died.

He did keep his power by purging everyone all the time, which is another thing that seems to work better on humans than pure rationality would suggest it should. People were never risk-tolerant enough to stop him, but also never risk-averse enough to avoid working for him, probably out of hubris.

I’m currently working with a German guy, and am trying to.figure out how to broach the subject of how did common, decent people become so indoctrinated to an extreme right ideology.

I’m going to recommend Ordinary Men, which is a book cataloging and analysing accounts of members of one of the battalions responsible for machine gunning people into ditches.

A random German won’t necessarily be super into history. A random Israeli is liable to say it had nothing to do with fascism and everyone is always against the Jews specifically. History is still going on there, and there’s no objectivity.