Friday Night Links

• Bottom line: the slow-moving, minimally invasive Anglo-Saxon schemes of regulation and litigation assume fair play, that people mean well, deserve due process, and are entirely unsuited for the vast majority of the world’s population, who do not share these cultural values. Such systems require a “guilt culture” like ours, where individuals, as part of their self-image, desire to behave according to abstract notions of right and wrong and align their behavior, however imperfectly and often tempted, to those notions, and feel bad when they fall short. In much of the world, the only effective regulation to make scammers behave is swift, violent, and unilateral punishment, no trials, no judges, no juries. Our system is only well-suited to a free people with at least the contents of cultural Christianity, where outliers are rare enough that enforcement’s necessity is rare. It will fail against the human default of “shame cultures” where public reputation is all that matters, and besides which, cultures where cheating foreigners, especially, from their perspective, gullible, foolish ones like us who believe in people following the law voluntarily as a matter of personal morality, is seen as smart, not wrong. [The Tom File] 
• This attitude is a variant of the philosophical notion that all truth can be arrived at by pure thought and is unfounded and harmful. One wonders what state space travel would be in if the Goddards and yon Brauns had spent their time trying to find the universal laws of rocket construction before trying to build space ships. Al needs a stronger experimental base. Like other branches of endeavor (notably physic, aeronautics and meteorology), we should realize our desperate need for more computing, and do things about it. [Hans Moravec]
• I don’t think we appreciate how much modern liberalism will be associated with the brief period of time where broadcast media was dominant, and small groups of people could send one-way communications to large groups who could not yet compare notes about what they were receiving. [Harry Bergeron]
• In exchange for deleting the cost, complexity, and schedule risk of a gas powerplant comes the sizable land demands of a solar array. To a rough approximation, 15 acres of solar are required per MW of DC AI load. For reference, the USA has about 150 million acres of unpopulated desert west of the Mississippi, enough for 10 TW of AI development. 10 TW is much more than total global electricity generation today. There is plenty. On the other hand, while fracked gas is relatively abundant (for now) the turbines that convert it into power are hard to make, hard to ramp, and largely already spoken for. If AI seeks growth beyond the production ramp of turbines, it is clear which way the wind is blowing. [Casey Handmer]
• If you look at the history of vitamins, they were all discovered between 1910 and 1948. Casimir Funk invented the idea and called them “vital amines.” The thing is they ain’t all amines: Vitamin C isn’t, nor is B5 or B7 (I think they’re amides; I never took organic chemistry, sorry not sorry). We’ll stick with the “your body needs it” definition. Vitamins were originally discovered to prevent disease, but also to optimize health. I don’t think there is any acute disease associated with Vitamin-D deficiency (which most indoors people have), though it makes you pretty unhealthy if you don’t have enough of it. Or, conversely, helps you to remain pretty healthy if you have a good amount of it. The fact that there exists such powerful vitamins without acute deficiency syndrome rather indicates that there may be many such cases. Here are a few inexpert suggestions for consideration by people who get paid to think about such things. These are all well-known substances with well-documented effects; I’m not suggesting anything esoteric. Some of ‘em I take myself, because spending a few bucks at the supplement shop is cheaper than massive medical intervention later in life, and there’s no obvious downsides other than purity/adulterant concerns (which are ubiquitous with anything you put in your mouth anyway). [Scott Locklin] 
• When bureaucracies were created, they were innovative and productive organizations. I know it’s hard to believe, but USDA, the FDA and the EPA were once as innovative and productive as early years NASA. Now ... not so much. People have been complaining about PFUAs and stuff like fire retardants to the EPA for decades. But the squirreley numskulls who warm the chairs there are too busy doing the crap they’ve been doing since Nixon created them by fiat in 1970. Optimized for old battles. Most of which are already won. [Scott Locklin] 
• Smil takes us through a couple of historical examples of Inventions; ones which helped but later turned into problems (leaded gasoline, CFCs, DDT), ones which were supposed to set the world on fire but didn’t (airships, supersonic flight, fission reactors) and ones which sound amazing but we just plain can’t figure out how to do (nitrogen fixing wheat, fusion reactors, hyperloop). Smil, because he actually studies the history of real technologies and how they work makes some disapproving sounds at the AI hypewagon spinning up at the time he wrote this (2023) and reiterates that the idea of continual progress is a total myth. There was a time of enormous technological progress which actually changes how people live: it’s mostly been over for decades. People still act as if we’re still being given marvels like refrigeration and gas turbines, when all we get is twitter (founded 2006) and radiophones with longer battery life that you can use to call a taxi without talking to anybody. [Scott Locklin]
• Organic growth capital investments, net of proceeds from asset sales, are expected to be in the range of $1.9 billion to $2.3 billion in 2026, which includes estimated growth capital expenditures of approximately $2.5 to $2.9 billionless approximately $600 million of proceeds from asset sales. Sustaining capital expenditures are expected to be approximately $580 million in 2026. [Enterprise Products Partners L.P.]