Global Warming on Triton

mircea_popescu The page on climate change was replaced with a page entitled “An America First Energy Plan” that ignores climate change entirely and says, “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.”
mircea_popescu awww.
mircea_popescu check it out, mp was right "by mistake" again! dat climate change! hurr!

A group of idiots history has meanwhile forgotten (but I haven't, nor ever will, because I just don't) fancied themselves on high horses almost exactly two years ago, and in the pursuit of their preferred brand of doomed nonsense attempted to handwave my opposition through ad hominem attacks. Supposedly one of the oldest blogs, and certainly the largest single author blog on the known Internet is nevertheless run by someone who has no powerⁱ. Then, once that became unsustainable outright ridiculous and not.one.single.moment before it was exchanged for "MP is right occasionally". Because my existence spans decades whereas the memory of the UStardian expert barely stretches to the beginning of the current semester, and consequently this sort of nonsense can be "intuitively supported".

To help along in the effort of intuitively supporting it, let's translate a piece from eight years ago, back when Trilema was only slightly older than the average blog and only slightly larger than the largest. It goes like so :

Global Warming on Triton

Global warming is, as various dorks preoccupied with things too large for their narrow minds never tire to inform us (notwithstanding they never seem to find the time to bother themselves with infinitely smaller things, in principle more relevant to them, such as an adequate diet or amorous relations), a global problem.

Or whatever, it used to be. After the terrible winters of the last years (do you recall, by the way ?) it's no longer to be called "global warming", it's to be called "climate change". The Romanian version for the newly enacted politically correct expression wasn't yet found, our hipsters being (like the other social groups) slightly behind the cultural phenomena towards which they gravitate. It's hard out there for a satellite.

And speaking of satellites, let's go into a paranthesis. Triton (Τρίτων) is the "messenger of the sea" in Greek mythology, a monster sired out of Amphitra by Poseidon himself. He was the father of Pallas, and adoptive father for Athens, who he took in, and who killed Pallas (who already had killed Ajax by setting his ship on fire). The fratricide inspired a festival in classical Libya, dedicated to Athens, whereby girls from the Machlien and Auseen tribes fought, the victims being considered "false maidens" retroactively. This on the topic of PE reform in schools.

Later (in 1846), when a satellite of the planet called Neptune was discovered, it seemed sensible to name it Triton, and that's what it's still called todayⁱⁱ. Triton the satellite is a celestial body of considerable remarkabilitude. Firstly, its orbit is retrograde, just about the only satellite in the Solar System with such a property. What's a retrograde orbit mean ? It means the satellite spins contrary to the direction of rotation of the planet around which it gravitates, which implies it couldn't have formed in place, but must have been captured later on.

Triton is the largest natural satellite in the Solar System, and also larger than the mass of all other satellites combined. Because it lives so far from the Sun, Triton is very cold, average temperature on the ground being somewhere around 40K (which means -230 Celsius, about -380 Fahrenheit). A major cause of the cold on Triton is the albedo (the quality of reflecting light), which is very high, chiefly because the surface of the planet is made up of 55% solid nitrogen, with some 15-35% ice of the more common variety (here) and for the rest... carbonic snow. A true icebox.

The funny part is that Triton, being large enough to have a hot core as well as solid phase convection, enjoys volcanic activity! Triton's volcanoes however do not erupt lava, but water, methane, and on occasion alcohol. How does that sound ?

And now to close the paranthesis : astronomical observation shows a 5% growth in the satellite's temperature between 1989 and 1998, which promises an exceptionally warm summer for Triton, something unseen in centuries. The theories available to explain such climate change on an astral body 4.5 billion (4`500`000`000) kilometers away from Earth are modifications in the crystalline structure of the ices on the planet leading to a change in the albedo.

But I know better, because I've seen a short clip on tritube, where they clearly stated that the guilt for global warming on Triton is entirely upon the uncontrolled "carbon" emissions. On planet Earth.

In closing, let me point out that the best part, as well as the only advantage of living among deliberately clueless stubborn idiots is the relative ease of comedy gold production.

1. Yes, it sounds ridiculous now, and it sounded ridiculous then. To different groups of people, however :

   Simon Kinahan, Software developer, EDA guy, reluctant product manager
   795 Views • Simon is a Most Viewed Writer in Bitcoin.

   Gavin will "win" because most people won't even realize there was a debate, let alone a "war". Gavin has the network alert key, so when he says "please upgrade to avoid being left on a fork", most people will upgrade. Hard to get away from that. Mircea Popescu isn't likely to persuade anyone that he's right because in all of the three blog posts on this subject I found, nowhere does he bother to explain why he's opposed to a larger block size, instead committing the space to expressing his dislike for Gavin, the Bitcoin foundation, and people who ask stupid questions like "why are you opposed to a larger block size?". Having never heard of the guy before, I suspect he's merely an opportunist who sees an opportunity to fork the chain and profit by it.

   That "opinion" of a "most viewed writer" was there as of early 2016. First place. Meanwhile of course everyone realised, and the USG tool in question no longer has the "alert key" nor are "alert keys" anymore a thing. Consequently that "opinion" of a "most viewed writer" is no longer there, as of early 2017.

   And just in case you wondered how come the impression formed in your mind that quora, that baneful pile of steaming shit has useful answers, let's quote the logs :

   mircea_popescu Framedragger the reason there's a lot of credence in phf's perhaps harsh criticism is How to make money on the Internet while pretending you know what you're talking about and accumulating a legion of mindless followers - for fun and profit! this is a "business model", and in the shit the us is these days, it's actually a "premium" business model : establish "authority" of the purely wordy sort, then pivot. on one hand there's the mfas, a number game, based on brute force. like say showaround. on the othe rhand there's "authority blogs", like say gawker.
   asciilifeform it worked great, perhaps most recently - for yudkowsky. and hell knows how many other charlatans.
   Framedragger i mean.. i agree; i just don't agree that tptacek fits the category. sure, there are analogies, but then there exist analogies with mircea_popescu, too.

   mircea_popescu I'm just saying in general, i myself have nfi who he is.
   Framedragger right, right.

   mircea_popescu understgand that the a/b split-scam scheme there discussed can do this with ~identities~ too. just create a tree of them. people generally misunderstand the extreme power of the fuzzing attack. consider the proper model for this : let there be an unknown endless list of binary questions. you create an endless list of identities, which you publish, 2^(n+1)-1 for the nth question. unknown to anyone but you, they are linked in a tree (ie, you know in advance identity 10111010101 will answer "yes" to q1 no to q2 yes to q 3-5 etc). for an observer, these being unlinked, there's "genius" identity 10111010001 which answered correctly to that many binary questions in a row. in point of fact, there is nothing there. what we ALSO know for a fact is that the count of people actually active on facebook last year (~10mn) is deeply dwarfed by the number of facebook accounts (>1bn). where's the difference from ? and if it were this, who'd know ? and this is just the first step. nothing forces your identities to keep playing ; you can retire them at any point you wish, and now you have a stable of "never wrong over n binary questions" respectables. this is ~half of the usg "national security" plan, except they suck at both modelling and implementation.

   This is what they do. They don't do it deliberately, of course -- not out of some kind of ethical consideration or moral imperative, but because it'd be too much work. They're too lazy, being from the US to implement their little scam properly, instead depending on wanna-be third world aspirational's own vanity to do it for them. Who's Simon Kinahan ? A "most read writer" ? Or perhaps yet another Kenya-born future president of the US ?

   Now go re-read the tombstone of Hacker News and start understanding the world you live in already. [↩]

2. Not exactly a small accomplishment, this, in the age of John Smith. [↩]