Yeah, ocean temps in the Atlantic tend to be slightly cooler during El Niño years, which suppresses hurricane activity a bit.

On the other hand, if ever a hurricane-like cyclone were to devastate Los Angeles, this would be the year.

I was pretty disappointed with Outer Worlds 1/2, but I actually enjoyed Avowed and loved Pillars of Eternity 1/2. This could be interesting if they actually take some risks and don't try to make it blandly appealing to everyone (though I'm not super optimistic about that). BG3's breakout shows that there is a market for relatively crunchy true RPGs with good writing and production values.

New Orleans would kick ass as a Fallout setting.

Other fun options would be to make it isometric

Pillars of Eternity is one of the best modern CRPGs. BG3's success shows that there is a market for this if done well. No better time than now to try it.

Get in early on any prediction market for 2027 setting a global temperature record.

Not in general, no. ENSO has complicated impacts that vary by region: some places should expect more snow this winter, and some much less. It pushes the major atmospheric circulation patterns--including the Pacific jet stream--off their usual tracks. What that does depends on where you are. Here's the map for expected US impacts, based on standard El Niño effects:

On a more global scale, a strong El Niño is associated with hotter than average temperatures. Very strong El Niño years (e.g. 1997, 2016, and to a lesser extent 2023) are usually when we see global temperature records really breaking hard. See here:

Each of these is amplified by the increasing amount of extra warming already baked into the system; El Niño and climate change compound one another. The graph I posted originally can be thought of as a distribution of "El Niño strength" over the years. You can see that we're way, way above even the strongest signal in recent memory, so we should expect extreme statistial outliers. It will take the atmosphere some time to catch up to the ocean, since ENSO is a phenomenon that originates in ocean currents. You can think of it as kind of like turning on a lava lamp: it takes some time for the heat to propagate and start creating interesting flows in the fluid medium. You'll start getting strong atmsopheric impacts in November or so. I'd expect 2027 to absolutely shatter global temperature records.

You've also got to look at precipitation and max temperature too, though. The USDA map really only takes the average extreme low temperature into account. That's changing, but it ain't the only thing.

For a lot of people, I do. I think many people like this are ultimately buried in their cultural context, and never had an event breaking them out of that mould / making them question what are for them basic assumptions about reality.

I used to think this also, and then I saw huge numbers of people dying of COVID while still insisting it wasn't a real disease. Now I'm not so sure.

The 35 year lifespan mentioned in the article seems overly conservative to me.

Agreed. That's probably the lifespan of continuous operation, if I had to guess. After that, it might need to be shut down for deeper maintenance and retrofit. If you're willing to do that though, these things run basically forever. We've been maintaining giant clocks for hundreds of years, and this isn't much different than that.

It was definitely already a thing. Grandfather clocks operate on gravity batteries with chains and metal weights. The issue has always been scaling them up in a way that isn't insanely expensive: all those heavy bobs and chains on a clock can be replaced with a watch battery that's like 1/1000 the weight and will run for just as long. However, chemical batteries--even rechargeable ones--eventually deteriorate and turn into waste. Big chunks of concrete or iron or (most commonly I think) water last a lot longer. You get much less energy density, but much longer lifespan (and using stuff that's pretty common already). As we (speaking loosely, and not ) have started caring more about sustainability, batteries that can be made from recycled crap we have laying around and maintained like basically giant clocks start looking more attractive.

The other big thing that's changed is scale of renewable production. Most battery solutions have been focused on point-of-use storage, and there the energy density matters a lot. I can put a 10 kw/h lithium battery in a closet at my house. To store the same amount of energy with gravity, I'd have to put King Kong up on the Empire State Building and drop him off, which I cannot do in my garage. However, as more renewable energy capacity starts spinning up at major centralized locations where space is at less of a premium, the cost/benefit shifts. I can build something like the thing in the article (or a huge water pump in a reservoir), and yeah it takes up a huge amount of space, but it's in the middle of nowhere rather than my house, and it effectively lasts forever relative to a Tesla power wall or whatever. If you're regularly producing hundreds of extra megawatts of solar power and space isn't at a premium, then the stability and longevity start to make the cost and size worth it.

Probably much less so than a comparable chemical battery, and you don't need any rare earth elements that catch on fire if you look at them wrong or destroy ecosystems if spilled. Modern human civilization is pretty good at maintaining big purely mechanical doohickeys.

Agreed that Hayek is really the only one of these guys worth reading. He's one of the grandfathers of modern complex systems theory, and actually had some interesting stuff to say.

Reading critical reviews like you're doing (I enjoyed Neoreaction: A Basilisk) is probably more worth your time than reading the originals. Remember that virtually none of the important movers and shakers have actually read the theorists they claim to revere either.

The fact that their use of Signal was successfully presented as proof of terrorist intent should be extremely alarming to everyone.