> ROSA is 20 percent lighter (with a mass of 325 kg (717 lb))[3] and one-fourth the volume of rigid panel arrays with the same performance.
And that’s not the current cutting edge in solar panels either. A company can take more risks with technology choices and iterate faster (get current state-of-the-art solar to be usable in space).
The bet they’re making is on their own engineering progress, like they did with rockets, not on sticking together pieces used on the ISS today.
The memory layout can be better this way depending on how the fields of a strict are laid out. It also gives the data better locality.
Let's say you're iterating over position coordinates of some set of objects in a game. With an array-of-structs you can lose ou on cache locality if unrelated fields are nearby. If you use a struct-of-arrays you get cache locality advantages anytime you do something like "iterate over this 1 field for each object"
I'm not a fan or user of Celsius, but this is an incredibly inflammatory title with very little evidence to back it up. Claims like that demand greater proof. This is an incredibly lazy article
The author pretty much failed to do any research on DeFi investments (point 3 in the OP). Compound and Aave are just 2 of many places investors place their assets, and are definitely near the lower end of APYs. Badger, which Celsius has already said they used, offers much higher returns. So do other projects like e.g. Convex Finance.
Where do these high APYs come from? Well a lot of it is coming from incentives of these protocols and speculation in those native assets. But the author doesn't even know that, so I won't bother steelmanning his argument
So instead of actually debunking his arguments you published a handwavy reply? I very much think that if someone is offering insanely high ROIs but does not divulge how the value is created, you can safely assume it's a scam, and simply pointing out the disparity suffices as proof to me at least.
So, definitely not in defense of Celsius it smells funny to me as well. But the author doesn't seem to understand DeFi. I don't know how Celsius operates but if there's a genuine zero-knowledge proof of their operations then that is better than an actual audit. The author doesn't understand this and proceeds as if no audit actually happened. If the author instead spent some time researching the contents and the merits of the proof they'd make a better point. If the zK proof is bullshit, that's a far worse indictment than all the other circumstantial evidence in my opinion.
Anyway, I don't have much faith an operation ran by an old con artist and a 24-yr old actress would actually produce a valid zK-proof that covers their operations. That's the sort of thing you need a serious technical team for. So the article still stands in that regard.
Like he said in TFA: the zk-proof only shows they have control of some funds, it doesn't say anything about the origin of those funds, much less about present and future obligations.
> I don't know how Celsius operates but if there's a genuine zero-knowledge proof of their operations then that is better than an actual audit.
Someone might be able to demonstrate to you that they have a $20k bank balance.
Audits are where you try to do a reasonable job of making sure they aren't also hiding the fact that they've got $50k in credit card debt lying around.
I don't know what happens behind the scenes at Celsius.
I do know there are many ways to get those high ROIs in DeFi.
With zero evidence suggesting they are lying about returns, the charitable guess I can make is that they are getting high DeFi returns and giving their customers slightly lower ones after taking a cut.
Most of the high yields come day traders paying trading fees. For example on sushiswap on Polygon there are pools of ETH/USDC that people trade back and forth with trying to play the market. Every time they do a trade they pay a 0.3% fee. If you provide liquidity to these pools there is so much trading going on that the returns are currently 20% - 30% per year.
You can earn even more if you provide liquidity for riskier assets that have a higher chance of dropping in value.
The risks are impermanent loss and that the token you're providing liquidity for drops in value.
Yearn is a decentralized automated tool to find the platform that is giving the best returns and moving all the money they manage into it.
But the fees are taken from people speculating in crypto to make money.
Even though these are "fees" or "loans", the purpose is strictly speculation. It's not driven by intrinsic value, but people attempting to make money via speculation.
If I take a loan for a house, I can live in it. That's intrinsic value.
So the system only works to the extent that people are willing to pay for tokens without intrinsic value. Does not seem sustainable to me
I don't particularly care why they're trying to trade the markets, or if they're providing intrinsic value, but I'm happy to invest money and collect 20-30% dividends from them.
If everyone suddenly decides they don't want to trade any more, then I'll find somewhere else to invest my money.
I just glanced through these and don't see any explanation.
They basically just say "we put it in a vault and harvest the rewards".
What I'm asking is where do the rewards come from. What is the underlying mechanism that makes this model sustainable.
If you invest in a REIT, tenants earn money through their business and pay rents. If you invest in a BDC, the BDC makes loans to businesses and collects interest. Relationship and risks are quite clear here.
If you're Bernie Madoff you generated high yields for investors for decades by taking money from one investor to pay another, and ultimately was not sustainable and bankrupted many people. For example.
So are DeFi yields like a BDC, or like a Bernie Madoff?
I think the main answer to most of these questions is that everything works well as long as BTC and most others currencies continues to rapidly increase in value as a result of a lot of cash inflows into these cryptocurrencies. This papers over all of the fraud at least for now...
When the explanation is too complex for anyone to really grasp or verify, realize that this is probably intentionally opaque in order to hide the fact that it is either hugely risky, built on a house of cards or it may be just outright fraud.
Some yearn vaults invest in liquidity pools that let users pay 10bps or whatever to trade one stablecoin for another. So the yield comes from that 10bps fee.
The sUSD yVault deposits sUSD into overcollateralized lending protocols and collects interest on loans to other users (who are presumably using Aave or CREAM as places to buy leverage to get super fucking long crypto). So the yield comes from other users paying interest to borrow sUSD.
Background/Disclaimer: I'm long crypto and have significant assets in Gemini's Earn program, a regulated variant of crypto lending that pays 8% on their stablecoin, GUSD.
I found Celsius and Yearn to be too sketchy/inscrutable to bother with[1], so I'm not going to defend anything about them, only the narrower claim that (some) DeFi liquidity pools are a non-Ponzi, sane way to earn returns in some conditions.
Liquidity pools [2] function as automatic market makers, using their assets to allow traders to trade between two cryptocurrencies. As a liquidity provider, you lock up two cryptos in return for a cut of the fees it takes from traders; your cut is proportional to how much liquidity you contributed. Those pools expose an interface to the Eth network that lets anyone put one of the cryptos in and take the other out, with a pre-determined formula for how it figures the exchange rate. Its profitability comes from the extent to which this exchange (after accounting for both pool fees and Eth network fees) gives a better deal to traders than their other alternatives (like centralized exchanges).
Like any market maker, you face the risk of "impermanent loss" from the shift in relative value of the cryptos, as market makers make standing buy/sell offers which look stupid when the market moves against them. There are also setup fees and all the usual risks associated with smartcontracts. When you consider how long you have to leave them in the pool to make a profit, and those fixed setup fees, plus the opportunity costs of lending through other providers with less volatility[4], the returns (3-100%) just about barely compensate you for the risk.
I experimented with them starting about three months ago and made a presentation, for which you're welcome to see the slides (slide 7 summarizes the downsides):
Contra bhouston's claim [3], these LPs don't require ETH to perpetually gain value: as long as traders continue to use the pool, ETH could stay stagnant or even fall significantly and they will still pay a return, though a long-term fall would induce a big impermanent loss (in an ETH-stablecoin pool) that would take a while for fees to compensate you for. (Edit: Although I suppose you could argue that people won't keep trading between ETH and other tokens unless that speculation, in the aggregate, is merited -- but it's not a simple matter of the pools only being profitable as some kind of derivative of ETH's value.)
Even though these are "fees" or "loans", the purpose is speculation. The whole web of connections in the flow of the money is rooted by people speculating to make money.
These aren't loans that are made to acquire some intrinsic value, like buying a house, investing into growing a business and so on. People use this liquidity or take crypto loans to try to make more money elsewhere in crypto.
Is that right? Is there a tie to the real world in there?
To me, this appears quite unsustainable and prone to failure if a risk off event comes. How would crypto have performed during the GFC? It's fallen 80% before even in times where economy has been perfectly fine. The whole ecosystem is ripe to implode due to 0 intrinsic value to owning the tokens that would otherwise cushion a fall in value.
Even in a severe recession, cashflowing businesses have value, rental properties have value. Crypto has none that I can tell.
Wait, what? The entire purpose of my previous comment was to clarify the role of liquidity pools, part of something in another reply that you asked about, and you are asking about wholly unrelated things I have no expertise about. Can you at least comment on whether that (IMHO honest and thorough) attempt to explain LPs addressed anything you asked about?
>Even though these are "fees" or "loans", the purpose is speculation. The whole web of connections in the flow of the money is rooted by people speculating to make money.
LPs don't have "fees", they just have regular fees, no need for scare quotes.
>These aren't loans that are made to acquire some intrinsic value, like buying a house, investing into growing a business and so on. People use this liquidity or take crypto loans to try to make more money elsewhere in crypto.
I don't have an special expertise on what the crypto loans on Gemini/Celsius are for, beyond what their literature says. However, everything you've said there applies just as well to (secured) margin loans that brokerages make. Do you have the same objections to those?
There may well be many ways to get ROIs in excess of 12.68%. There are also many ways to obtain investment capital on better terms than a fixed 12.68% APR, especially if you're really, really good at investing. And if you want as much USDC as possible it's even odder to lend some of it back out at 1%!
I guess the charitable explanation for them raising capital as expensively as possible from randoms on the internet is they're feeling charitable themselves. I seem to remember that was how all the pre-crypto HYIP "investments" explained the generosity of their compounding daily return offers
There are also other ways to get these returns outside of DeFi, like by staking ETH, selling covered calls, or various other strategies on centralized services
The crux of the OP’s argument to me is that The company and others in this space position the yields as being “in kind” to savings account yields despite it very much being a different risk ballgame. See the frequent hacks on https://rekt.news/ for example.
Do sites like Celsius explicitly claim to be as safe as insured savings banks? No of course not but they play a similar linguistic game of association to Tesla’s “autopilot” nomenclature.
As with most things do your own research and don’t risk what you can’t lose.
What's the ROI on staking ETH right now? Is it anywhere near the rate that they claim?
>selling covered calls
you're taking on risk when doing that. It works well until you get assigned, in which case you take a massive loss and unable to pay back your investors.
How do you take a “massive loss” on covered calls being exercised? They have defined risk, you give up some potential upside to collect premium. If they are exercised, the underlying is called away.
Selling naked calls has a lot more risk, see the blowup of optionsellers.com on naked natural gas options
>How do you take a “massive loss” on covered calls being exercised?
The loss comes from the opportunity cost of what you could have sold the underlying asset for. That might or might not be "massive", but the potential is definitely there. At the end of the day you're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Maybe it even has expected value greater or equal to the advertised APY, but failing to disclose that and/or pretending like it's guaranteed is deceptive. I'd be pissed if I put my money into some sort of "savings account" with 8% APY, then get wiped out next time there's a spike/dip, because it turned out that they were using it to write covered calls.
Agreed. And once the irrational optimism leaves the market, we'll see just how stable this whole system is. It mirrors the irrational, misplaced confidence in the housing market back in 2007.
Tether feels like the most likely POF based purely on the attention they're getting now, but nobody knows exactly how it will bust.
I’m not really knowledgeable about DeFi, but here’s a simplistic model (would love to be corrected by someone with deep DeFi knowledge):
1. You put $1 of ETH into a new protocol, let’s say a new Decentralized Exchange on Ethereum that is paying a high amount of interest in order to attract liquidity to their protocol. The high interest is perhaps paid in ETH or maybe in a new token for the protocol.
2. Users flock to this new DEX, and actually use it, generating trading fees for the DEX, which drains activity from CEXs like Coinbase. If in step 1, the payment was made with a new token, perhaps that new token either earns a cut of trading fees, or gets governance rights over the DEX.
3. You either earned another $1 of ETH, or of the new token.
In the above example, it’s not a closed system anymore than the US economy is. A new company was created, which created real value by creating a better exchange which attracted users over CEXs. The company has value now it can payout because it generates trading fees and the equity/governance of the company is valuable. It bootstrapped that with protocol incentives.
Except that they aren't banks, and so there's no lender of last resort to backstop them. [1] There can't be any assurance that depositors would get all of their money back in the event of a bank run if the money isn't backed by actual dollars or a lender of last resort.
Well… I’m not expert on DeFi or anything but until the 20th century banks existed and didn’t have this right? But yes, there were runs on banks… but there are no runs on CDs right, and that’s a banking product also? Why not? Well, they’re contractually wrapped up for a time period. What if all DeFi lending is/was similar and crypto contracts locked them up for set periods… would that be an OK and legitimate system then? If not why not?
Except of course, that the crypto world insists that all these cryptoinvestors borrowing crypto to buy other crypto to sell for more crypto to repay their original crypto debt is an ecosystem which isn't [even more] dependent on inflation of the crypto supply.
That and unlike stablecoins the Fed doesn't pretend it's fully backed.
> Where do these high APYs come from? Well a lot of it is coming from incentives of these protocols and speculation in those native assets. But the author doesn't even know that, so I won't bother steelmanning his argument
Is this not the very definition of a ponzi scheme? The returns coming from "incentives" of these protocols and "speculation" in those native assets sounds very ponzi-like to me.
If the yields are actually coming from speculation, it's not a Ponzi. Ponzis don't generate real yields, they just shuffle money from new investors to old investors. If it's actually making risky bets and winning them it's more like a hedge fund or something.
Of course hedge funds don't have steady 10% yields, they lose money when their risky bets don't pan out.
If they are actually lending the money out to people who aren't investors, earning interest on it and returning that to investors, then Celcius is not a Ponzi scheme, it's probably speculating on weird, opaque and shitty assets, but it's not a Ponzi.
Like, if I set up a business "investing" in worthless penny stocks and somehow manage to generate returns, I'm not running a Ponzi. Maybe I'm pumping and dumping those penny stocks. It's still a scheme, it's just not a Ponzi- I am actually earning money for my investors! I'm defrauding other people, but I'm not defrauding my investors.
Pump and dumping penny stocks works exactly like a Ponzi scheme. It's a layer removed perhaps, but the early buyers win and the later buyers lose, by definition.
I'm not an expert in Celsius, perhaps it's structured a bit differently. But any system that relies on new investors paying out the old is structured akin to a Ponzi scheme, if there's no intrinsic value element to the speculation.
If AAPL pays a 10% dividend, huge numbers of people would buy it for the yield. The yield comes from their underlying business, not from investor money. This puts a floor on the price.
When your yield only comes from newer investors, that's not intrinsic value or sustainable
"A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors"
Explain how pump and dumping penny stocks doesn't apply? I agree that it's a bit different in nature than most Ponzi Schemes due to lack of central entity orchestrating it, but the net effect is the same in the end.
You get in early, you win, you get in late, you lose.
Even if we call it something else, it's clear the underlying mechanism and unsustainability of returns is the same.
I've seen that definition of Ponzi schemes a lot and it doesn't really explain how they work - you could say the same about, say, most of the stock market where the only way to exit your position is through funds from new investors. The defining feature of Ponzi schemes is that they pay out interest using the funds of new investors. It's important to understand this carefully because it's the reason Ponzis have to fail - the actual paper amount investors have in their acounts and can withdraw is backed by a pool of money that's slowly eaten away by the fraudulent interest payments, until one day the scheme can't meet withdrawals and the whole thing implodes. Ordinary cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum don't have this underlying mechanism and so it doesn't make sense to call them a Ponzi scheme. That doesn't mean that they're a good investment, but they don't work anything like a Ponzi. This lending scheme, on the other hand, has most of the usual Ponzi warning signs.
You get dividends from stocks, so new investors is not the only way.
Stocks that don't pay a dividend have promise of paying one in the future as their cash flows grow. That's the fundamental basis to all stock valuation. It's why people talk about P to FCF, PE, PS ratios. For growth stocks, hypothetically, how much in dividends could I get 30 years from now?
It's true that many investors don't consider what the fair value actually is, but that's how you end up in a bubble and the price disconnecting from the fundamentals never lasts forever.
Real estate more obvious and direct via rents.
But yeah, pump and dump kind of stocks where they far exceed their fundamental value are similar.
We can argue semantics and what defines a Ponzi scheme, all I'm saying is that crypto largely has no intrinsic value. Any value that's explained is always self referential in terms of other crypto.
Bitcoin has some small intrinsic value for illicit payments, or hedging inflation in countries without capital markets. You could argue the net intrinsic value is negative due to the environmental costs though. But outside of edge/fringe cases, all valuation relies on a greater fool effectively.
Even gold is still majority used for industrial purposes, despite also being seen as an investment vehicle.
> Explain how pump and dumping penny stocks doesn't apply?
That's just market manipulation. Going on Twitter and saying "BTC to the moon!" isn't a Ponzi. It requires an actor (like Charles Ponzi) to take new investors' money and pay it to old. Bitconnect was Ponzi scheme, not in some abstract sense.
> You get in early, you win, you get in late, you lose.
So vague it applies to everything that pays interest...
If I buy a stock or a bond, I get the dividend payment regardless of when I get in. It doesn't require you to be early, just to accept what the current value proposition is.
You'll make more money if you time it right, but you get some intrinsic value from it even if no future investors ever come along.
Or more obviously, buying rental property. Cap rates change over time, but you always get some real return.
And "pump and dump" implies a coordinated scheme. Usually they'll create groups/networks and call for everybody to buy in. But they tend to frontrun the group. We can call that something other than Ponzi, but at the end of the day, the later buyers are paying off the earlier buyers, and it's zero sum.. the underlying relationship is the same
I'm talking about a hypothetical scheme where you get some capital from some investors, and then go out and pump and dump penny stocks onto other people who aren't your investors, and then return your winnings as interest to your investors. You are genuinely earning money for your investors (and defrauding other people).
In a Ponzi, you can't satisfy all your investors- you literally don't have the money you say you do. Eventually it will collapse and piss off most of your investors. But if you are really good at pumping and dumping you could in theory just keep doing that until you can't make money anymore, and then close up shop with a tidy profit for you and your investors.
Yields for nascent crypto projects are basically marketing budgets and user acquisition costs passed on to the user as profits instead of going to Google Ads or being a coupon for free fries with your order. They want to incentivize people to bring liquidity to them, and pay them for it. The real question is whether or not this actually leads to retention or of it's wasted capital, but that's beyond the point of the article.
"Its flagship product: 10 to 12.68% annual returns on USD stable coins and this with little to no risks."
What is more likely that they figured out a way to "hack" the financial system to make such returns in a very safe fashion or that they are doing things behind the scenes which may be a little bit sketchy?
10% safe annual returns is a bit high if one thinks that the APY is reflection of how risky the investment is.
The promise of DeFi is that it's supposed to reduce risk for lenders by letting them see the assets of borrowers in real time. If the risk to lenders is lower but interest rates are higher then how can it not be a Ponzi scheme? There's literally no other possible explanation.
I would be interested in seeing other articles on this topic.
As someone new to DeFi, I found the article sparked new questions, even though as you said it wasn't deeply researched.
If Celcius is basically reinvesting into a bunch of other assets, it's possible, or even likely, that the high yield assets are too good to be true. That's where my concern would be. Is BadgerDAO rock solid? Compound? I would be curious to see expert analysis of these. Celcius is simply built on top.
This. Plus, if you deposit Eth on Aave, it's not for the 1% returns but because it then allows you to borrow other coins which you can use somewhere else in DeFi, where it can bring you much higher returns (convex/curve for instance).
I'm amazed that this guy wrote such a big article on a topic he obviously doesn't fully understand.
The problem is also that people are using the word "ponzi" to describe every investment they think is bad and/or don't understand. offering high rates doesn't automatically means it's a ponzi. With the definition that some of you are using here, literally every single bank, currency, edge fund and all publicly traded companies would be a ponzi.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that anyone who guarantees returns greater than the historical return of the S&P 500 is a ponzi scheme.
I don't know of a single reputable bank, hedge fund or publicly traded company that does that.
A huge number of places do have high returns from time to time. But any reputable firm points out that past returns do not guarantee future results. No reputable firm guarantees returns that high in the future.
The key is the guarantee.
Anyone who GUARANTEES returns that high in the future is suspect, and therefore must be more transparent than usual in order to clear the bar. The article indicates that Celsius was less transparent than usual in describing exactly how they made their high returns.
Celsius does say "While Celsius strives to maintain stable reward rates over time, any change in circumstances may bring about changes to such rates, and in some events the rates may drop to 0%" deep in their Risk Disclosure.
A large proportion of readers on HN are also quite lucky in similar ways to OP and can make this work. This lifestyle also requires less luck now with remote work having taken off big time.
It seems silly but makes reading chess books and analyzing games much easier. The first time I played with the vision tool for 20 minutes I felt way faster at it already.
The current limit is $10,000 (but practically less in an attempt to nail those who engage in "structuring" transactions to avoid the $10k limit). That's a car or any other number of things in reach of normal not-considered-wealthy people. [0] is interesting reading, but honestly just searching for "structuring" leads to several cases like [1] where the government seized $107,000 from a convenience store owner due to the deposits from that business being under the reporting threshold.
I don't know how you get under a $600 threshold, but exposing orders of magnitude more people to this policy is likely to do far more damage than to result in any good. This is already not just about wealthy people.
The zig approach seems really well suited to low-level libraries where you really need to handle these errors (and custom allocators, etc.) but it's kind of annoying for general purpose programs.
You could probably use a low Japanese table for this pretty well.
I think a combination of positions is probably best to get variety in muscles you're using. Reminds me of a theory I heard that hard-backed chairs are actually better because they make you fidget and readjust your body, versus using the soft chair as an external spine
> Hence, they point out that focusing on superintelligence gets you a way bigger bang for your buck than, say, preventing people who exist right now from contracting malaria by distributing mosquito nets.
This comment and others in the article seem to be making a (bad) case that Effective Altruists don't care about the Global South. I find this bizarre because all EA enthusiasts I know are very much into mosquito net altruism.
The argument is specifically against longtermism and against the idea that "existential risk" should be prioritized over immediately helping people.
Maybe there are actually a lot of EA who don't approach things this way. Great but that's not countering the objection to longtermism producing bizarrely distorted priorities.
I'll admit the article doesn't make explicit the point that hypothetical scenarios like trillions of people colonizing galaxies are simply too tenuous to base present reasoning on - and the hypothetical dangers of "true AI" are even more tenuous.
Yes, that is the main argument and I agree with it. But bundling it with EA is just inaccurate.
Longtermism seems to me like one of many deadends that utilitarianism takes you down if you embrace it and only it as your moral theory.
A little bit of utilitarian thinking can be fine when you have another theory to tell you the "why". That's why I don't have any problems with EA which is usually quite concrete
I don’t understand where AI-safety research is ever meaningfully competing with renewable energy for resources. The article is making the case that these two types of progress are mutually exclusive, without any evidence. What’s a plausible scenario where the environmentally conscious choice today comes at the expense of individuals living 10000 years from now?
Here's a passage from Toby Ord's PhD thesis quoted in the book. "Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive."
It seems like the Longtermism critiqued by the article is discussing by article is indeed talking about the real distribution of real resource.
Its not from Toby Ord, it is from Nick Beckstead's Thesis.[1]
The idea is introduced as an couple sentence thought experiment in a 200pg thesis (emphasis mine):
>To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards, at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards, saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.
Context is important, specifically the abstract assumptions of fixed cost for each life, and fixed innovative capacity.
You could easily turn the premise around with the opposite conclusion. Improving the innovative capacity in poor countries is more important than saving lives in rich countries, provided you foster more innovation innovation in the poor country than is lost in the rich one.
It looks like an interesting read, covering many topics discussed in this thread.
Chapters include:
Should "Extra" People Count for Less?
Does Future Flourishing Have Diminishing Marginal Value?
A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities of Enormous Values
Context is important, specifically the abstract assumptions of fixed cost for each life, and fixed innovative capacity.
Sorry for the mis-attribution, at the same time both the quote, your explication of the quote and the chapters you cite seem consonant with the longtermism the article (rightly imo) criticizes. One point the article makes is that reasoning this way can justify anything.
Reasoning with based on "Infinite Value, Long Shots, and the Far Future" is inherently fallacious, is no more plausible than arguments like pascal's wager. The only limit on "long shots" is one's ability to cook them up (which alien landing should we be preparing for anyway, etc).
That quote in isolation is also evidence-free (and sort of appalling imo), I’ll have to look into all that Ord has to say about this. But I’d like to point out that choosing whether to improve lives in rich vs poor countries is not equivalent to choosing whether or not to engage with climate change aggressively.
The article is specific critique of the idea of longtermism. The article puts together a number of arguments and quotes showing people following the logic of weighing purely hypothetical far-future people against the actual interests of real people and advocating resource transfers accordingly. I've shown a bit of this in the quote above.
That quote in isolation is also evidence-free
-- Are you implying some caveat or extra bit of information could make the quote OK?
No just that cherrypicking quotes like that (by the author, not by you) does not really show that longtermism and climate change efforts are mutually exclusive, _even if_ it shows one influential and potentially mistaken person believes they are. Like I said before, I'm just looking for a plausible example of where pursuit of environmental goals would negatively affect the lives of people 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 years in the the future; basically I think one can be an adherent to longtermism without having to denigrate environmentalism. The strawman the article creates is that these things are mutually exclusive when they are not, and creating this false dichotomy is not helpful to any of the important causes in question.
> ROSA is 20 percent lighter (with a mass of 325 kg (717 lb))[3] and one-fourth the volume of rigid panel arrays with the same performance.
And that’s not the current cutting edge in solar panels either. A company can take more risks with technology choices and iterate faster (get current state-of-the-art solar to be usable in space).
The bet they’re making is on their own engineering progress, like they did with rockets, not on sticking together pieces used on the ISS today.
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