As you pointed out, the viable area with a sufficiently cold winter is probably shrinking every year. Perhaps the better solution is the one proposed by Yablonovitch et al in which they suggest using deserts instead, though I think that is about as risky, and also a tremendous risk for fire.
Deep down, I have the gut feeling that in a century's time, people will think we were clinically insane for not trying to stockpile as much carbon as possible in whatever means we have, since it is clearly the foundation for biology, and widespread synthetic biology will use it (and N, and P) by the gigatonne. I really don't see any fundamental physical reason why we won't be growing entire cities made out of wood with the right genetic engineering and sufficient feedstock.
Thanks for taking a look at that article! In short, you're right on the first item; only a fraction of that total arable land actually experiences subfreezing winter temperatures.
Given your word choice, I suspect you hail from Britain or a commonwealth country and your (appropriate) definition of township differs from mine. I should have defined it as "survey township" which is a USA term for a grouping of land parcels six miles tall by six miles wide. Again, the number presented is a ballpark estimate, as though we may not have as many nice villages and hedgerows in the Dakotas and other Plains states, we similarly do not farm every single literal acre--though many act as if we should, animals and people be damned.
It'd be nice if you just wrote the article yourself instead of using ChatGPT. I know it's a lot of work, but I would be much more inclined to finish it.
I think that there's a major difference in the resulting mindsets that the two types of experiences form, though.
The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.
The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.
Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.
I can tell you wrote the article with ChatGPT. I’m out as soon as I pick up the smell. I don’t dislike the usage of AI, I just don’t trust. It if you haven’t written it yourself.
I expect it will be popular to dogpile on this article and point out how it's wrong in all sort of ways. I don't mean to do this and appreciate the writing, but a core difference is that software engineering always strives to avoid catering to the idiosyncrasies of the time and place while civil engineering is virtually all about the quirks of the site.
My point is not that oil fails to generate revenue. Clearly it is a lucrative business. Instead, my claim is that the state economy was remarkably robust, productive, healthy, and well-optimized for middle class quality of life pre-2007.
Does it sound surprising to you that it was perfectly normal to rent a perfect acceptable two bedroom apartment in a safe town on the interstate for $300 a month and still easily find dignified, decent paying jobs without 1000 applications?
I've lived in many cities and work in tech now, and I can confidently say that, as it concerns the professions and jobs that unambiguously sustain and improve life, no community on the planet was more productive than my home state. There is more to the story than some shale.
I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.
I don't like this article. In particular, this section is especially poor:
> Block 1: We couldn't calculate fast enough. Solution: The GPU.
> Block 2: We couldn't train deep enough. Solution: Transformer architecture.
> Block 3: We can't "think" fast enough. Solution: Groq’s LPU.
#2 is outright wrong. Deep networks were made viable from residual layers and their refinement. #3 is also incorrect; "think" = compute so this is the same statement as #1.
A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.