He remains a weirdo.Peter Thiel doubled down last night on his "Google has maybe been infiltrated by the Chinese government" claim, which was eventually picked up by President Trump. When (lightly) pressed for evidence, Thiel simply said he was "asking questions."Why it matters: You don't propose that someone deserves to face a firing squad without at least a single receipt.So a few questions for Mr. Thiel:
- Have you shorted Google stock or is Palantir currently competing with Google for a major U.S. government contract?
- You've said on the record that you're "not a vampire." Are you able to provide independent verification of this claim? Because, were you a vampire, it could pose a national security risk given your ties with senior U.S. officials.
- Is it because you're actually a vampire that you deny being a vampire? And would that not be seemingly treasonous, in that the generally accepted societal punishment is death (albeit by wooden stake, in this case)?
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
The strange Thiel in the news again
Axios has some questions for Peter Thiel which are nicely sarcastic:
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no actually it was a good thought provoking speech.
https://medium.com/@bonniekavoussi/notes-from-peter-thiels-speech-at-the-national-conservatism-conference-on-july-14-2019-6a51b26b202
https://twitter.com/yhazony/status/1151227964996096000?fbclid=IwAR0EMKuah2IQcSsorAWYOnYnFtbO3qabclXfbnA8nilULsi_8T36obULhLo
actually Graeme you may have a dilemma on your hands because the organiser of the event where Thiel made his speech is a member of the 'oligarchy'
Right yes its very strange. Thiel reminds me of Conrad Black. Seems like a good bloke and you'd wonder why he was being given so much finance to buy up newspapers around the world. With Conrad they came down on him and took everything away again but you wonder how he made it in the first place.
Who was the organiser?
this is the conference - quite a few interesting speakers . Yoram Hazony is the main guy https://nationalconservatism.org/
Much of the speech appears to have been Thiel's greatest hits, some of which I will address:
* the whole "where's my flying car" line strikes me as kinda childish and akin to arguing with physics again (just like on climate change). Great engineering advances may be happening slower simply because they have hit some really hard, fundamental problems - much as I argue about fusion power. We see this in other fields too - the "war on cancer" being a good example. But is nothing happening in the fields? No. We'll probably have flying taxis, of a kind, soon, but everyone owning a flying car was never going to be a thing. Is fusion power coming? Maybe - billions of international dollars are being spent on that new test bed in Europe, but is there any evidence that spending billions more would speed up a technology that has several really hard problems to overcome? No one really knows. Medical optimists in the 70's and 80's were predicting a triumph over cancer because of additional funds. Hasn't happened - because it's a really hard problem.
Thiel comes along and thinks that advances aren't happening as fast as he would like because Silicon Valley got more interested in social media than engineering and technology. Meh, it's a theory, but where's the evidence to show it's true? It's just a hunch, but no better than the next person's. Mine is that fusion may never be a viable source of cheap energy. Prove that I am wrong.
Silicon valley is spending lots of money (isn't it?) on one dramatic future change - self driving vehicles.
* His reported comments about Google are pretty outrageously provocative:
"He then suggested Google’s actions were “seemingly treasonous,” asking whether DeepMind or Google senior management had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies. “These questions need to be asked by the FBI and the CIA,” Thiel said, “And I’d like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.” "
No evidence, again, just a hunch or something.
* His free trade comments - I will have to come back to them.
* His comments about the left generally:
"...the left is captured by the institutions, and the institutions are corrupt and sociopathic. He also said that political correctness is the biggest problem in our society, and Silicon Valley has the feel of a one-party state."
Tell me, in what way is "political correctness" genuinely "the biggest problem in our society".
Same with "woke capitalism".
Seems to me people like you and Thiel get upset with with irritants that are quite minor in the big picture (stupid college students stopping a right wing figure talking; the multiple gender stuff; a rugby player getting sacked for talking about gays) and inflate it in an enormous cry of THIS IS WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD TODAY, but with no evidence as to how it is hurting economically or even culturally on a huge scale.
If we want to get ahead in technology in Australia we need to conduct loyalty tests with ASIO. And then task them with the job of protecting our research projects from all manner of disruptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOB7nezuQ7g
I like Peter Thiel's take on things. I think science has been ground down to a near halt. So many dogma's and patents getting in the way. Like Einsteins idea that you can convert matter into energy. Pure voodoo. So all this money getting wasted on fusion. Low hanging fruit going un-plucked in the electrical sciences.
We have to go back to where the oligarchy successfully halted our understanding of the way the universe works and injected all this fantasy in its place. The CSIRO and ASIO together could push the whole thing forward under the right management. We need to go back to Steinmetz and work forwards all over again. Thats how we get gravity neutralisation and therefore sane space travel. Once we have big setups within asteroids the size of Ceres, we can find a storage system for the unlimited electricity that can be harnessed from space at least as far out as Saturn.
We should have computer animation of various heretical models of the small stuff. We should have a university course based on the work of Steinmetz, with all the lab stuff laid out to repeat the experiments, all the study guides laid out. Animations explaining everything because we need to get people educated up to the state-of-the-art level of knowledge, as it stood when the propagandists swamped everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiI0IrNyIEo
But the problem with hollowing out Ceres and lighting it up like Vegas is that someone already seems to have done it.
https://innemedium.pl/sites/default/files/imagecache/Oryginalny/images/12112219_1567059180183273_502927902314446320_n.jpg
My other two hypotheses as to what is going on in Ceres is that 2. these pictures are fakes and they are running another psychological operation on us or 3. Ceres has just gotten big enough to start synthesising pristine hydrogen. The pristine hydrogen is being ignited with pooled oxygen near the surface.
But option 3 is not really a good one. Not because of the pristine hydrogen. Thats fine. Ceres after all has already developed intermittent geysers and Pluto has permanently erupting ones. The problem is rock isn't transparent so underground fires would not shine through like that. They may shine through in infrared. The other problem is it would require a fluke of timing, since this oxygen cannot last forever.
So not only do we have lighting on Ceres, we have glass manufacture on the ground it seems. You'd have to think it must be another NASA psychological operation since the other serious alternative is someone has set up large underground bases there with thick glass as part of the roofing. A closer look will find mechanisms for catching the solar wind and turning it into electricity. This all seems very unlikely but its indeed how we would set up a base on an asteroid. You have to grow food up there. You have to run cattle up there. Aquaculture. The whole bit. You want that dim solar light coming through, as well as your own artificial lighting. Thick glass is how you would do it because there is no end to the availability of silicon on location. And glass-making is important to electrical industry. Thick glass also takes a one-step production system. All remote location economics is based around short production chains. Really no chains at all. One and two-step production.
Thiel is only letting go of a small amount of his suspicions I would suggest. The alleged technological explosion that we have lived through is more just economically sophisticated applications based on pretty crude understandings of things.
Everyone has to come around to my way of thinking sooner or later. The dam is breaking. The psychological operation can only hold up so long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJGkqP4TwI
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