AnthonyRepetto

Karma: −71

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 10:32 PM
1 point
−3
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
I’m surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 10:25 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
I agree, pre-existing infrastructure and coagulation of agglomerated capital are a huge inertia to change; that doesn’t make the idea itself a bad one. If I had a junker car that was so horrible, it was unable to drive me to the dealership where I could buy a new one, then that does not cause “the car at the dealership isn’t worth it.” The car at the dealership is still worth-it; I just have a junker that prevents me from attaining that desirable. So, considering that it is the junker which stands in the way, then the fact that “the junker can’t get us to the optimum” is actually a good argument against the junker.
This is true in other scenarios, where others often abuse the mistake in reasoning. The stereotypical case is when someone say “We could improve the economy/politics with XYZ” and the responded dismisses the new alternative by saying “But the current system would never let us get to that new alternative—therefore, the new alternative is unattainable, and ‘sour grapes’ - the new alternative must not be any good.”
That line of reasoning is false; in fact, if the current system prevents improvement, that is a strike against the current system, NOT a strike against the improvement.
So, yes, I agree: there is immense inertia in our current system, making Arctic Ice Highways very unlikely—yet that inertia is a sign of the current system’s limitations, and those limitations don’t “make the ice highway fail to function”. I hope we can be clear about those two different claims: “Ice Highway can’t work,” vs. “Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline .”

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 10:13 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Erm, no not a pressure vessel. A vacuum capacitor. They hold electrons, and they are able to charge and discharge in a fraction of a second, which is essential so that your floating power-bulb is able to haul-into port, discharge, and leave quickly. Batteries on a ship would take immense amounts of time, or immense amounts of copper; you pick. Vacuum capacitors are also empty, with a surfacing of Teflon for high electrical insulation, resulting in minimal capital; they are cheap, light, easy to mass-produce, and simple enough to automate their routes.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 12:07 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
[[Tangent inspired by your mention of ship batteries: I had been running the numbers, back when Europe was first looking at undersea power cables from North African solar farms—and it seemed reasonable to manufacture immense floating bulbs… just, big hollow, rigid-shelled floaties, for vacuum capacitors of immense scale, able to deliver power to various locations flexibly, without using rare materials. It’s a vacuum inside, so it’s perfect at sea! Spain was looking at cables on the order of a hundred billion bucks, to power Europe properly—when we could just make giant plastic hamster balls, and roll them across the Med.]]

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 12:03 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Thank you for getting into details :)
Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don’t see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that ‘I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction’. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benefit from fast, cold transport. And, those goods earn higher premiums; I expect the ice-highway’s margins would punch above their market share.
In terms of load-transfer, I would love it if global deep water ports were some genius of efficiency—a few huge or wealthy ports are such marvels. But, in contrast, the bottleneck at most major ports was just recently a year-long global boondoggle. I’m not sure you want to argue that it was somehow the best possible solution; the real solution to transferring loads involves replacing union labor with robots. And THAT is much easier to do at a new transfer-location, which can connect to one of the more numerous small ports, for the shorter, local hop that would be needed. Giant ports are only necessary for giant ships, and those are only necessary for long voyages. By switching to ‘last-mile’ boats, you can go small, which lets you utilize those hundreds of under-utilized small ports, closer to their destination. That sounds like efficiency, not loss.
In regards to your concern for “an entire tech base...” being needed; yes, it is a different tech-set. And, I don’t see that as a limitation; the tech required is minimal capital cost, mass, operating labor, and it provides an immense multiple of capital-into-capital, as well as energy-into-energy. (A few hundred kg to lay 200,000 tons of ice each winter is not an ‘overwhelmingly exorbitant tech base’ that would prevent feasibility. Similarly, spending 1 joule to pump and spray water that transfers 3,200 joules of heat is a simple device with insane energy-yields, not an insurmountable tech-hurdle.)

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 11:50 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Thank you for getting into details :)
Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don’t see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that ‘I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction’. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benefit from fast, cold transport. And, those goods earn higher premiums; I expect the ice-highway’s margins would punch above their market share.
In terms of load-transfer, I would love it if global deep water ports were some genius of efficiency—a few huge or wealthy ports are such marvels. But, in contrast, the bottleneck at most major ports was just recently a year-long global boondoggle. I’m not sure you want to argue that it was somehow the best possible solution; the real solution to transferring loads involves replacing union labor with robots. And THAT is much easier to do at a new transfer-location, which can connect to one of the more numerous small ports, for the shorter, local hop that would be needed. Giant ports are only necessary for giant ships, and those are only necessary for long voyages. By switching to ‘last-mile’ boats, you can go small, which lets you utilize those hundreds of under-utilized small ports, closer to their destination. That sounds like efficiency, not loss.
In regards to your concern for “an entire tech base...” being needed; yes, it is a different tech-set. And, I don’t see that as a limitation; the tech required is minimal capital cost, mass, operating labor, and it provides an immense multiple of capital-into-capital, as well as energy-into-energy. (A few hundred kg to lay 200,000 tons of ice each winter is not an ‘overwhelmingly exorbitant tech base’ that would prevent feasibility. Similarly, spending 1 joule to pump and spray water that transfers 3,200 joules of heat is a simple device with insane energy-yields, not an insurmountable tech-hurdle.)
I like batteries, and I also fear that competing sectors’ demand for them will slow our transition; already, California’s solar abundance creates perverse daytime rates, driving-out the incentive for more capacity.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 1:49 AM
−3 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyRepetto’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Will any of them admit that they were wrong, sans rebuttal? So many commenters here ghost as soon as the flaws in their argument are illuminated… It’s a demonstration of their unwillingness to admit fault, which might be related to why they like to frequent a website claiming to absolve them of error—“I must be correct, when I give hand-waving dismissals and I don’t account for the details, because I’m a regular of LessWrong.” Your site does a worse job of catching fallacious reasoning than the philosophy site I moderated 25 years ago, as a middle-schooler. You’re not less wrong than we were; you’re a huge step down in quality.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 1:43 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
This also might help:
Given the dimensions of ship and ‘lane’ I described, then so long as ships turned-about at the edge of the plateau, then they could literally tack back-and-forth more than a HUNDRED times, blindfold, before the average collision. There is an immense amount of space between each vessel, and it’s a shame that the commenters on this site don’t realize such simple metrics when they claim “you’d crash into each other”—you show a lack of comprehension for the scale involved. Your claim does not stand-up when scrutinized in detail.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 12:52 AM
−1 points
0
on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
For those who don’t want to do the mental math:
With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the ‘lane’ I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of ‘lane’; literally only ¹⁄₁,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the ‘full capacity’ I listed. It’s bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying ¹⁄₁,600th of the available area would somehow collide.
Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m2 of ice—it can hold a hundred tons reliably. So, if you didn’t mind a really tall stack, your 500t ship could occupy a much smaller footprint.
Further, 500t was an easy value to plug-in, for estimates of total annual tonnage delivered. I don’t assume that 500t is the optimal scale; doubling each dimension of the ship would only increase its footprint by 4x while providing it with 8x as much room on the ice, 2.8x longer to respond to any disruption or potential collision.
I also have a feeling that “make sure you all don’t collide” is a pretty simple math problem for autonomous sailboats. Especially considering that you can geo-fence the track. Rio Tinto has been using autonomous vehicles on their mining sites, precisely because you’re unlikely to run over somebody’s dog there. Same reasoning applies to a hundred-foot-tall wall of ice at the top of the world; autonomy would allow dense traffic at low capital, again.
I have yet to hear a realistic critique; all these responses stem from the readers’ erroneous assumptions, or lack of digesting the scale described. In contrast, I’m scraping my brain for the best ways to solve the real engineering hurdles, like de-crusting the spray nozzles, because particulates exiting the stream would become seeds for ice-crystallization. You know, the actual problems that would happen, if we did it… not imaginary hyperbole like “you’d run into each other, even though there’s a mile and a half to maneuver between every ship”. The critique I receive on this site is full of fallacies and errors; its commenters are not a reliable source of insight.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 13, 2023, 12:49 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
For those who don’t want to do the mental math:
With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the ‘lane’ I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of ‘lane’; literally only ¹⁄₁,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the ‘full capacity’ I listed. It’s bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying ¹⁄₁,600th of the available area would somehow collide.
Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m2 of ice—it can hold a hundred tons reliably. So, if you didn’t mind a really tall stack, your 500t ship could occupy a much smaller footprint.
Further, 500t was an easy value to plug-in, for estimates of total annual tonnage delivered. I don’t assume that 500t is the optimal scale; doubling each dimension of the ship would only increase its footprint by 4x while providing it with 8x as much room on the ice, 2.8x longer to respond to any disruption or potential collision.
I also have a feeling that “make sure you all don’t collide” is a pretty simple math problem for autonomous sailboats. Especially considering that you can geo-fence the track. Rio Tinto has been using autonomous vehicles on their mining sites, precisely because you’re unlikely to run over somebody’s dog there. Same reasoning applies to a hundred-foot-tall wall of ice at the top of the world; autonomy would allow dense traffic at low capital, again.
I have yet to hear a realistic critique; all these responses stem from the readers’ erroneous assumptions, or lack of digesting the scale described. In contrast, I’m scraping my brain for the best ways to solve the real engineering hurdles, like de-crusting the spray nozzles, because particulates exiting the stream would become seeds for ice-crystallization. You know, the actual problems that would happen, if we did it… not imaginary hyperbole like “you’d run into each other, even though there’s a mile and a half to maneuver between every ship”. The critique I receive on this site is full of fallacies and errors; its commenters are not a reliable source of insight.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 12, 2023, 6:00 PM
−1 points
2
in reply to: Lalartu’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
You originally claimed that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice.” Then, you switch to saying “It is not necessary to pave the road—the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.” Both are still strange claims; when ice is accumulated hundreds of feet thick, the surface texture beneath it is irrelevant.
You also insisted, strangely, that “ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that.” Why would an ice highway accumulated in the way I described necessarily have a surface identical to natural, untended glaciers? You never explained what would prevent flattening the ice as I had originally described. Your claim lacks any support… at all.
And, you said originally that “There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible.” You seem to be confusing the limitations of a ship on lake ice, which can crack under heavy loads, compared to what I described—ice on land, a hundred feet thick. There is, in fact, no metric of materials strength which implies failure at 500 tons; it is wrong to assume that the skates, or the frame, or the ice, would magically fail at hundreds of times less than their ultimate compressive strength. It is, by metrics of material strength, entirely reasonable to assume ships that large are possible. Check the numbers; your claim of “no reason” has no merit.
Let’s also assess crew pay, because you multiply the entire crew, which includes engineers, etc. A TEU costs $500 to send between Germany and South Korea, and weighs 25 tons; $20 per ton. So, a five-day haul across the Arctic, with 500 tons aboard, would be priced competitively with a revenue of 500*20 = $10,000. In five days. For shifts of pilots, each paid $60K annually, or $30/hr (which is good pay in Russia! Multiple times average...) in 120 hours cost $3,600, which is only 36% of the revenue. Consider, also, that folks pay a premium for higher velocities—not just for perishables; being able to get-ahead-of their competitors, especially. Further, refrigerated cargo pays a premium, too! So, the rates that an Arctic line could charge would naturally be a higher average, even if a portion of their cargo didn’t need speed or freeze (because you still want to operate at maximum capacity). That’d push the crew-members’ cost percentage down further.
You’ve made repeatedly false claims, unsupported, and you ignore the numbers. I’d hoped for intelligent critique on a forum calling itself ‘Less’ wrong; I’ll have to go back to talking to real engineers.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 8, 2023, 8:55 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
You’re welcome to check the numbers, again—I mentioned “5km wide should be plenty” as an illustration. If tacking led to disruptions, you could easily multiply the width of the ice-lane manifold; as mentioned, a spray-wall 10m tall with a 10m/sec arctic wind (the Polar Vortex there) would produce enough ice to cover a mile wide, 400 feet deep, when compacted… each year. You want it ten miles wide, 100m deep? That’ll only take 2.5 years. And, again, the amount of capital required is minimal—a hundred kilos per meter of shoreline, while the amount of ice produced is immense—hundreds of thousands of tons per winter. Similarly, for every 1 joule of energy that you spend spraying water, you are transferring 3,200 joules of heat to the air, as that water freezes. 3,200x inputs is not magically ‘too expensive, too hard’ just because ships zig-zag as they tack. You could claim that I would need 10x more ice, and that still wouldn’t make the design ‘impossible’ let alone unprofitable.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 7, 2023, 10:13 PM
3 points
0
on: The Feeling of Idea Scarcity
A good methodology for idea-generation, which avoids attachment to the “but-it’s-my” idea:
1. Explore the design-space. Look at all the possibilities; because it would be ignorant to ignore them. You aren’t supposed to find ‘the best’ here; this is about answering “What is Possible? What are my Options?” If you’ve only come-up with three to five (e.g. “It has to be Capitalism, Communism, or Socialism”) then you haven’t even started. I looked at a few dozens of ways to combine Zeppelins, Paramotors, and Sail Boats… five options ain’t even started.
2. Look at the pro’s and con’s of each idea—in order to find the patterns between those ideas. You’re not picking ‘the best idea’! If two ideas both share a particular failure, that’s where you ask: “What is it about these designs that leads to that failure?” Now, you have a better grasp of what sorts of problems come from what kinds of designs. No good designs, yet!
3. Pick lots of weird niche-application-spaces. NOT because you plan to market into those niches—no! Rather, when you ask “How would I have to design this for an Arctic Marine Environment? Or, if it has to fit in an elevator, and fold into the trunk of your car?” You are narrowing-down your options in that vast design space, creating extra constraints, more problems to overcome beyond the normal. That is when you have to hunt for the weird and surprising solutions. Stack those odd-balls up! None of them are good stand-alone designs.
4. You now have a good sense of what’s possible, and what designs create which sorts of problems, and you’ve come-up with lots of awkward niche-solutions. Now, you can glom those niche-bits together, and see if any of them stick; this is combinatorial search, so you’re probably best meandering for a while. If anything stands-out, see how you can hone-in on it. Most of the time, you’re still left with a pile of junk! Sometimes, you have a new algorithm, or a new touchscreen, or a zeppelin-paramotor-caravel.
So, by shuffling through and clustering solutions according to which problems they share, (step 2) then you are actively identifying all the problems, in general… including the problems with your ‘favorite,’ early, almost-certainly-bad idea.
What links here?
- AnthonyRepetto's comment on Sail Over Mountains of ICE... by AnthonyRepetto (Jan 14, 2023, 3:01 AM; 2 points)

AnthonyRepetto Jan 7, 2023, 2:22 PM
3 points
3
in reply to: Lalartu’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Your reasoning is erroneous:
Ice can be accumulated on rugged surfaces, without prior paving. That’s how it happens in nature, which is a proof by contradiction. I hope you can admit your claim that “First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice” is false.
The structural limits to supporting weight upon solid ice, and supporting weight upon skates, are not magic numbers that no-one could guess. We have charts of material strengths, so you are again wrong when you claim that “Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than ¹⁄₁₀₀ of this cargo weight”—further, “1/100th of this cargo weight” would be only 5 tons. You might want to check your facts on yachts’ cargo capacity.
Finally, crew pay is only a tiny fraction of a ship’s cost; it’s an immense piece of capital, has unfathomably difficult maintenance, and fuel, fuel, fuel. Increasing the crew costs is off-set by eliminating fuel costs, as well as reduced capital-cost per unit payload delivered due to higher velocities along a shorter route. If you actually want to criticize the cost-structure, you have to include the changes to ALL the costs, not just the cherry-pick that says you win. It’s embarrassing to have to point this out, when I made all these things explicit in the original.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 7, 2023, 2:15 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Um, check the numbers, again—I gave each ship a 2km by 200m ‘zone’ around itself, at my measure of full capacity. That’s not going to lead to them bumping together; it’s a hundred acres per ship. Stopping/maneuvering before you speed past a ship ahead of you? You have 2 and a half minutes to do so, even when they are at a dead-halt. And, you have hundreds of meters to either side. It’s bizarre that claims of ‘too close’ are made, when you don’t give pause to the actual measurements involved. It shows a lack of real effort.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 7, 2023, 2:10 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
No. I’m pointing to the extreme disparity in costs of your trade-off. Sacrificing a percent of taiga to eliminate a large chunk of CO2 emissions is not “an overwhelming environmental loss that ensures impossibility.” You claim “always end up on ice due to ecological impacts.” I’m not sure Russia cares as much about their environment as you do, either. They already seem quite interested in that Arctic shipping-lane, already. Your claim of ‘impossibility’ doesn’t hold-up to the details.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 2, 2023, 7:40 PM
−3 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Run the numbers, like I did; this produces many hundreds of times more infrastructure, per unit equipment. It’s more capital-efficient. Do you understand that concept? Because if you do, you can check the numbers: that will answer your question.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 2, 2023, 7:39 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
My ‘lane’ was only to estimate density of vessels, to show that they would be very far apart—two minutes until you approach a stopped vessel ahead of you. At 5km wide, the entire plateau would be wide enough to tack. And, the Polar Vortex is persistent; check the weather where it’d happen, instead of assuming an evenly-distributed, equal probability of all orientations.

AnthonyRepetto Jan 2, 2023, 3:21 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Oh, and the shipping industry emits roughly 1 Billion tons of CO2 per year, which ice-sailing eliminates… Pretty sure that helps the climate more than “protecting 5 miles of barren rock out of 500 miles, that grows grass for two months a year, and is covered in ice anyway for the whole remainder of the year—gotta keep that safe!”

AnthonyRepetto Jan 2, 2023, 3:10 AM
−7 points
−1
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Sail Over Mountains of ICE...
Well, if the choice is between “Let glaciers melt and sea-levels rise, which destroys those Arctic environments, along with all the others” OR “cover just a 5 mile wide stretch of the most barren ranges, among thousands of miles of them—less than 1% of that region’s area , in order to ventilate heat into space when we freeze ice, reflect extra sunlight via our Mylar as well as the additional ice surface, and create ice reservoirs against desertification, because of late melt into the ground.” It’s one of those scenarios asking “would you sacrifice a single, old, talentless, obnoxious guy on a forum, in order to save the lives of thousands and create a safe environment for ecological hot spots on tropical islands?” I’d kick the geezer off that ice-shelf. And if we keep dragging our feet on climate change, we’ll have to consider proposals that make sacrifices, soon.