Uncharted Territories

> What America got, by being the heavyweight in NATO, was the greatest economy the world has ever seen. America got rich by selling Europe a nuclear umbrella But this just isn’t true! The U.S. overtook the UK in per capita GDP in 1880, near the peak of the British Empire: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-capita If you look at GDP growth rate, the US has consistently averaged 1.7% GDP per capita growth over the past 200 years. The mass industrialization during the war itself spike growth and helped recovery from the Great Depression, but America didn’t grow dramatically faster during the NATO era than it did before that.

That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth. As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despi… Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.

The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that it's somehow connected. Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance. Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size. With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely. . ... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-deceitful The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.

The poor countries claim has a footnote and a promise to explore it in another article. It doesn't say anything further about this. The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article, unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-deceitful)

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/ Not a blog, but very good family of YouTube channels: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryoftheUniverse/channels - History of the Universe - History of the Earth

> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing. I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show. Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so. I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despi… It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban…

Thanks for sharing the link! The article focuses on Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), an unscalable method of solar radiation management. MCB would require thousands of autonomous boats (ideally running without fossil fuels) to locate suitable low-altitude ocean clouds and spray them with finely misted saltwater to increase their reflectivity. At best, this method might achieve localized cooling over ocean areas, but its net impact on global temperatures remains uncertain—scientists are still debating whether it would result in overall cooling or even exacerbate warming in some regions. The specific experiment mentioned in the article was halted due to a lack of community engagement. The organizers failed to inform or invite the local mayor to the deployment event, leading to public backlash when residents learned about it from the New York Times. Much of the misunderstanding came from a perception that the experiment involved risky technology, though in reality, it was as simple as using a patio mister mounted on a retired warship. What I was referencing, however, is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which differs significantly from MCB in both the type of aerosol used (typically sulfur dioxide, SO₂) and the location of the injection (the stratosphere, rather than the lower atmosphere). If you're interested in learning more about SAI, here's an excellent primer: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection

First-time home buyers are getting squeezed by a combination of peaking market forces, but those forces are peaking and we're probably seeing the worst of it at this moment [1]. It will get better. [1] https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-i-dont-invest-in-rea…

This post is most likely related to a recent post on HN: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection

At first I thought the dwarf elephants would have come as a result of the Zanclean megaflood [0] of 5m years ago, which did cause some odd sized animals like the small dog sized rabbit Nuralagus [1], but the Mediterranean dwarf elephants did not appear until 2.5m years ago [2]. 0. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-zanclean-megaflood 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuralagus 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_elephant

Saw this posted the other day, and it seems like a potential way to offset some of the ice melt: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding

You'd win that bet: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about > I believe Bitcoin will replace gold, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currencies, and smart contracts will upend how we deal with each other. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories.tomaspueyo…

Probably, allowing polygamist marriage would have a similar effect. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-is-elon-musk-having-…

This is a good write up on the difference between Substack and Medium. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-substack

I am not a professional. I have been basing a lot of my virus information from Tomas Pueyo. Here is my source: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-omicron-question In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a week before the person shows severe illness

I found this to be a pretty good blog post summarizing China's geographical interests. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/what-china-wants Obviously they project soft power further, but it is based on economic leverage in the same way that the USA has been doing since WW2. For example, that French museum exhibition was dependent on a Chinese museum to do their exhibition. That dependency came with strings. Only a fool would think that means the Red Army is about to invade Eastern Europe.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/07/22334/ Cuomo has been known-terrible for a long time. --- https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/delta-variant-everything… discusses "The Hammer and the Dance", an article published in March 2020, that correctly flagged the risk of mutations. https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1368229958158610435 https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-variant-in-brazil-overwhelms-loc… WSJ, writing in March 2021: "countries such as Brazil risk becoming a breeding ground for potent versions of the virus that could render current Covid-19 vaccines less effective, public-health specialists warned." Biden's "wear a mask until you do" was in May - very irresponsible.