the closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)
Agreed. I was definitely expecting a reference, and I was confused that the table of contents listed the authors & their positions before mentioning the title of the chapter.
I lived in China for 6 months and saw plenty of cops with guns and saw undercover cops roughly throw around a street vendor who had gotten too close to the forbidden city for their liking. Your view here seems to be willfully obscured.
Having your opinion formed by the media is a necessity of living in a world where you can't get first hand information for everything, i.e. a constraint imposed by reality. the difference is that in the west you can choose what media you want to pay attention to, and the media itself is free to report what it wants.
As the poster above mentioned, Methane has a greater immediate impact, but it only stays in the atmosphere "for 11-12 years"[1], making it a relatively short term problem. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for "approximately 100 years"[2].
From Wikipedia[1], "In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died." So if your measure for bio-diversity is the number of unique animal species, it dropped by half at each mass extinction event. The events only reflect a drop in the diversity of animal species as this is an "easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere", so the overall change in bio-diversity could be lesser or greater.
If anyone else was curious about Scott's usage of "God" in this lecture, he talks about it here[1]. TLDR: they are "tongue-in-cheek references to an Einsteinian God."
>Right now Liberia has about the population and land area of Virginia, which means it's already overpopulated.
First, that assumes Virginia is 'optimally populated'.
Second, according to Google, the population of Liberia is 4.294 million (2013) and the population of Virginia is 8.186 million (2012), so using your Virginia-baseline, Liberia can about double its population before being considered over-populated. The Indian state of Kerala, meanwhile, has 34.8 million (2012) people in a smaller area (~38k mi^2 vs ~43k mi^2).
It can be very difficult here to get by without knowing chinese unless you live in a foreigner-friendly area (i.e. a tourist area or near a university).
I'd suggest using a tour company if you want to travel more widely. Having a translator at least would be very valuable.
"He had no idea who was behind it until last August, when he provided malware samples to a security firm at the request of a Bloomberg reporter.
A forensic analysis of the malware by Joe Stewart, a threat expert at Atlanta-based Dell SecureWorks, identified the intruders who rifled Solid Oak’s networks as a team of Shanghai- based hackers involved in a string of sensitive national security-related breaches going back years."