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[Helgoland]

I usually imagine Reels as arguing very passionately and raising his right index finger (or hand or whatever) every time a bolded word comes up, while simultaneously sort of going up a bit with his whole body by going on his toes for a second.

If this were a wild west town, he'd definitely be the preacher man. Good one, too.

[Reelya]

Bold is for emphasis, i could use italics if you like, however, I can barely tell things are bolded on Firefox with the darkling background, whereas the italics stands out a lot more. So I have gotten into the habit of using bold for smaller emphasis than italics. Italics has a different shape completely whereas bold only looks a tiny bit brighter. Calling that "shouting" seems excessive since it fact stands out the least of these of all these options for emphasis:

"quotes"
bold
italics
CAPSLOCK

Really there's no dif. between where I've used bold and could have used italics instead. And i don't think bolding a single word in a sentence counts a shouting in context. e.g. where i bold "as intended" or "externalities" in the last page were where you'd normally do something like italics. I mean it would seem weird if you were saying "you're not taking externalities into account" and you interpret the bolding there as a full-bore scream. Spoken language just doesn't flow like that. That's just stressing a single word for emphasis, I never would interpret that to mean shouting. If it was a "screaming" sentence then the flow would put the stresses on words such as "not" and "account".

e.g. "you're not taking externalities into account!". <= now that would be shouting.

The type of emphasis-signifier is, in fact, less important than where the emphasis is applied.

[Helgoland]

Huh, I'd use Italics for the same purpose. To each their own I guess.

A propos, and appropriate for the Tech thread: Do you guys know Sartalics? Now that's a useful invention.

[Egan_BW]

I use a highly strategic mixture of bold, italics, caps, and hitting the other person with a little rubber mallet.

[syvarris]

The type of emphasis-signifier is, in fact, less important than where the emphasis is applied.

Hilarious thing is, that's exactly the point I was making! 

[martinuzz]

Korean scientists succeeded in creating methane from CO2, water and sunlight, using copper and zinc nanoparticles as catalysts.
Even though the efficiency so far is only 1.5%, the process yields 99% pure methane, and takes place under standard pressure and temperature.
Furthermore, the zinc and copper catalysts are cheap easy to produce, and appear stable over time, which was a problem with earlier studies into the production of methane as a solar fuel.
Using atmospheric CO2 in it's production also makes solar methane a CO2-neutral alternative to fossil methane.

Producing methane with sunlight isn't economically viable yet, but when natural gas price rises as global reserves deplete, it might very well be 30 years from now.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/koreanen-toveren-aardgas-uit-co2-en-een-zonnestraal~a4534068/

[Reelya]

The type of emphasis-signifier is, in fact, less important than where the emphasis is applied.

Hilarious thing is, that's exactly the point I was making! 

Idk where that would be relevant to me though. I see posts by other people that are about 50% capitalization, but I never did anything like that. I looked through quite a few pages right now and the only time that I can find where I did any emphasis on more than literally 1-2 words ever was when what I was bolding was actually either to highlight a direct quotation, emphasized because it was the name of some thing you can google (e.g. i might bold "tragedy of the commons" or "prisoner's dilemma" because I'm too lazy to hyperlink them), or paraphrasing the exact wording someone else had just used*

Wierd was pretty full on with the all-caps stuff maybe you're mixing that up. Not everyone did that.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

e.g. where someone said "electricity isn't a finite resource" i responded "money is the thing being optimized and money IS A FINITE RESOURCE" which is about the only time I all-capsed anything. The whole point was to mirror a phrase that had just been introduced by someone else: "not a finite resource" by highlighting that they'd made a "category error". In the Tragedy of the Commons scenario, the finite resource is land, and the thing you add is sheep. In the household electricity / bitcoin example, the finite resource is money, and the thing you add is electricity. You can always add more sheep to the paddock or ramp up your electricity use without limit, that is, in fact, the entire point of Tragedy of the Commons, which is why I was so frustrated at that point that i sold my soul to the devil and all-cappsed 4 words in a row.

[smjjames]

Korean scientists succeeded in creating methane from CO2, water and sunlight, using copper and zinc nanoparticles as catalysts.
Even though the efficiency so far is only 1.5%, the process yields 99% pure methane, and takes place under standard pressure and temperature.
Furthermore, the zinc and copper catalysts are cheap easy to produce, and appear stable over time, which was a problem with earlier studies into the production of methane as a solar fuel.
Using atmospheric CO2 in it's production also makes solar methane a CO2-neutral alternative to fossil methane.

Producing methane with sunlight isn't economically viable yet, but when natural gas price rises as global reserves deplete, it might very well be 30 years from now.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/koreanen-toveren-aardgas-uit-co2-en-een-zonnestraal~a4534068/

Only thing though is that methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, so, they're going to have to make sure that emissions, leakages and unburned methane of that are minimized as much as possible. Otherwise we're just exchanging one greenhouse gas for an even more powerful one. The fact that they're doing it in a carbon neutral (or carbon negative even) way is great, just have to keep an eye on the emissions.

[Reelya]

Well there are processes for turning methane into other stuff such as ethanol using catalysts so that's what they'll probably focus on. Basically if you can precipitate ethanol out of fresh air then you have a winner.

[smjjames]

It's entirely possible that the methane produced won't stay in that form for long, just that if a lot of people are using that (as opposed to getting the natural stuff out of the ground), emissions from leakages etc should at least be monitored.

Obviously the CO2 is the far greater danger right now, but methanes greater effectiveness as a greenhouse gas is why those methane clathrates are scary if they start bubbling massively.

[Reelya]

The real issue here would be whether the total labor value of doing this process would be less than just planting more plants to make CO₂ into stuff. That's questionable.

We can already make methane from biosources, so if we want to do that I'm pretty sure bio-engineering some microbes might be more efficient than this.

[smjjames]

Could still have applications for things and places where you can't use biosources. It's really a starting point for others to find applications for and find ways to improve efficiency.

[Dorsidwarf]

The real issue here would be whether the total labor value of doing this process would be less than just planting more plants to make CO₂ into stuff. That's questionable.

We can already make methane from biosources, so if we want to do that I'm pretty sure bio-engineering some microbes might be more efficient than this.

Intensively growing microbes is still a fairly energy-hungry method I believe, and of course runs into the "GM is evil!" Bogeyman who would strongly resist the use of these.

[Helgoland]

The real issue here would be whether the total labor value of doing this process would be less than just planting more plants to make CO₂ into stuff.

Chlorophyll is actually fairly inefficient, and plants produce all sort of crap that is not what you want, i.e. methane. Though I wonder whether it wouldn't be more economic to run a process like this with hydrogen or electricity or whatever, so you can do it in a huge chemical plant instead of spread-out in a field somewhere.

[Maximum Spin]

You've implicitly made a shift from one-time games to games over multiple periods. Applying Reels's (intended) scenario there, you could for example buy an LED once, hope the rest of the house notices the reduced consumption, does the math, and switches to efficient bulbs as well. Part of your strategy however should be a plan for when that does not in fact happen, which should result in you not buying more LEDs either.

I think that Reels was originally considering the scenario as a one-time game, so the solution he gives is indeed correct. For a (n infinitely) repeated game it should come down to something like Grim Trigger (the Nash equilibrium, IIRC) and Tit-for-tat (interestingly not a Nash equilibrium, IIRC - there might be some mathematical weirdness about infinite series going on there).

Nah man, with perfect trust (everyone can model everyone else's choices) you get "buy the widget" in a one-time game, because everyone will buy the widget, knowing that everyone else will also buy the widget, without needing to "notice" whether the others did (because it's implicitly known that they will). This results in convoluted sentences because of the infinite regression of common knowledge, but it still works fine. You only need "a plan for when that does not in fact happen" if it is not in fact common knowledge that the other players are perfectly rational actors, which of course obtains in the real world all the time, but also means that you are not operating within the domain of game-theory rationality. Attempting to apply game theory to real-world situations simply fails all over the place and you'd have to pretty dumb (or Reelya, apparently) to try.