Is the universe a computer simulation? This question first arose as a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom in 2003. The argument is that if a computer simulation of reality is possible, then increases in computational power mean that a universe will contain far more simulations of beings than real beings. So it would be overwhelmingly likely that any particular consciousness is a simulation.
I think this misses the point entirely. There is no need to simulate everything, and Nick Bostrom never called for it. It is only necessary to simulate you and your sensory inputs. This is nearly within reach already.
So imagine some process that cannot be simulated within the rules of physics. That is fine, but who cares? All you need to do is to simulate the sensor data that would result from any experiment or measurement on the process.
That is much easier than you think, because there is no need for the simulation to be limited by the notional speed of light or even by causality. The simulation can easily backtrack and correct any earlier “results” that are made impossible by any future developments. The simulation does not need to run in real time, or indeed in sequence. It only needs to be ex post facto consistent.
It might take more compute cycles to provide sensory data to a quantum physicist than to, say, me, but that is fine. The physicist will run slower.
Any discussion of the Simulation Hypothesis is incomplete without a link to XKCD
I’ve been in Medicare part A since I turned 65, but not Part B or Part D, because I had private group insurance through my own jobs or my spouse’ job.
Part A is free, and provides hospitalization coverage.
Part B is about doctor visits, but requires copays and coinsurance.
Part D is prescription drug coverage
There is also a Part C, which is called “Medicare Advantage” and is an alternative to parts A, B, and D.
There are also Medicare Supplement policies “Medigap” that you buy from private insurance companies and which provide coverage of more of the copays and coinsurance and deductibles for Part A and PartB.
Well my spouse’s health coverage disappeared as of the end of October, which we found out about in late October. There would not be any COBRA coverage either, so it was time to sign up for the rest of Medicare. Coincidently my spouse also became eligible for Medicare in October.
First, I looked into Medicare Advantage plans, but they actually have rather high deductibles and rather high out of pocket limits, and they offer things that I don’t care about, like gym memberships. Nationwide, Medicare Advantage plans appear to be bad and cost more than classic medicare and generally are as bad as other private insurance. You might enjoy John Oliver’s recent rant about Medicare Advantage.
Medicare advantage lets you sign up anytime during your last month of existing coverage to obtain coverage starting the next month.
Thinking that the classic medicare plans might be a better option for me, I discovered that the providers will not let you apply for a Medigap plan unless you already have a Medicare number. I had one, but for Part A only.
Next step: apply for Medicare Part B. You can do this online. If you are not applying when you first become medicare eligible, you must provide proof of other coverage, in a CMS-L564 form from your previous group plan. If you have more than one plan for the interval between initial medicare eligibility and the date you apply, you have to provide several CMS-L564 forms showing continuous coverage in the aggregate.
There is no way to apply online if you have more than one CMS-L564. You must apply in person at a Social Security office (during a government shutdown) or you must FAX the application. Did you know that UPS stores are charging $3/page for sending a fax? Uploading scanned documents would be just as good, but SSA doesn’t allow it.
After a few days, I called Social Security about my application, and by chance found an agent, probably working unpaid during the shutdown, who decided to help me. She found the faxed documents and right then and there entered me into the system. I am so mad at myself for not getting her name because this was truly above and beyond what one expects from government. Great work! There are still people in the trenches up there who care about us.
With number in hand, I was able to apply for Medigap and prescription drug coverage at Blue Cross of Massachusetts.
It probably took me ten calls, so many that I encountered all sorts of people there. Those who didn’t care, those who gave wrong information, and those that were actually extremely helpful (Thanks Mark!). Evidently they have both full time staff and seasonal workers, and the seasonals have little training and crippled IT systems. Also their website has a ton of broken links for things they tell you to read before continuing.
A day or so later, the Blue Cross website admitted I would have medigap starting 11/1, but had no mention of my new dental plan or my new prescription plan, even though I bought them from Blue Cross.
The Medicare website seemed to know I had prescription coverage but not about the medigap. Down in the small type on the medicare.org site I finally found a link to the part D subscriber, which took me to CVS Caremark. Those are the same people who provided drug fulfillment for my old group plan from Blue Cross, but why did Blue Cross forget they existed?
Next, I tried loggin in to CVS Caremark with my CVS.com account, and it didn’t work. Aren’t they the same company? Then, after guessing I had to create a new account, it turned out that Caremark already knew about my prescriptions, which had gotten there via my Blue Cross health plan! These people are compartmented like a spy ring. Finally, on November 1, the dental plan showed up at BlueCrossMA.
So everything seems to be fine for me, but less so for my spouse. Since she had not yet signed up for Medicare Part A, she had no existing number. She applied for Part A and Part B online, but nothing has happened yet and might not for weeks. And unless you have a medicare number, you cannot apply for Medigap. The suppliers blame “Federal Law”. They are happy to accept an application for Medicare Advantage, but not for Medigap.
So if you happen to lose your health coverage in the same month you become eligible for Medicare, you cannot get continuous health coverage via Medigap unless maybe you applied for Medicare part A early and find a helpful SSA agent.
Luckily, my spouse has no pending visits, so she signed up for a $0 Medicare advantage plan, which is not very good, but it does provide continuous coverage, and since it is now annual open enrollment, she can choose to change it for 2026.
Which brings me to our 24 year old daughter. She was covered under the group plan, which was to expire at the end of October, with less than two weeks notice. Choosing an individual health plan is pretty awful when you have time, but really awful when you have to do it on short notice. And we had a PPO before, so we never had to care about networks, but individual PPO plans are crazy expensive, so for the HMOs you have to find out if your doctors are in the plan, or search for a plan they are in.
Next we found out that CareFirst.com, the Blue Cross supplier in Virginia, requires you to apply before the 15th of a month to get coverage by the next month. We didn’t even find out about this mess until after the 15th. We don’t know if the other insurers in Virginia would be better because we were able to rule them out based on price or horrible reputations.
But did you know that if you sign up for an individual plan via the Virginia insurance marketplace you can do it right up until midnight on Halloween to get coverage the next day? And the very policy we wanted from CareFirst was accessible that way. Kind of makes you question CareFirst’s internal policies huh?
The difference seems to be that CareFirst wants to check ahead of time if you qualify for a special enrollment period due to a life event like loss of coverage, or whether the marketplace will defer that check until after the fact and cancel coverage retroactively if you don’t qualify. We have a letter from the employer we think will work, but there is no official form for this and no one will say yes or no until it is too late to fix.
Also, it looks like the policy we really wanted was priced lower on the CareFirst website than on the Marketplace website, so in order to get continuous coverage we just picked the cheapest thing available on the marketplace. Because a special enrollment period runs until 60 days after the life event, we can change the policy (by November 15!) to get different coverage for December, and then change it again (by December 15) to get different coverage for 2026, due to regular open enrollment.
So all three of us get to take the weekend off and search for half price halloween candy before starting the battle again on Monday for December and 2026 coverage.
Also, I contacted my congressperson (Katherine Clark) to complain about this missing corner case in medigap signups. I think everyone agrees that continuous coverage is good, and that there isn’t any real reason to forbid signing up for medigap without yet having a medicare number, provided it shows up in the next few weeks. Systems should be loosely coupled! Insurance companies have no trouble paying claims that arise before coverage ends, even though they don’t arrive at the company until later. They should have no trouble accepting claims that arrive after the start of coverage but before all the paperwork clears. They could easily defer paying those claims until the paperwork is done.
First off, the administration’s attempts to deny birthright citizenship are blatently unconstitutional. There is simply no question about that.
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case, which was not actually about the consitutionality of birthright citizenship, but rather about the ability of district judges to impose nationwide injunctions.
The argument for nationwide injunctions is that it prevents immediate harms, such deporting American citizens. Without them, every individual affected would have to sue, clogging the courts and taking years to resolve.
The argument against nationwide injunctions is that plaintiffs go forum shopping for a friendly judge, creating 800 district judges each with an effective veto power over the president’s agenda.
I think the solution is different. Let’s permit nationwide injunctions, to halt immediate harms, but get immediate appellate and if needed, Supreme Court review. Cases of obvious merit should not take years to resolve.
If we resolve cases quickly, then nationwide injunctions do not create 800 vetos, and having them will not burden individuals with expensive and lengthly suits.
I came across the attached on a somewhat faded paper.
This was drawn by Ted Kaehler of the Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab Smalltalk Group (home of Alan Kay).
At the time I was working on PARC’s portion of the DARPA Bay Area Packet Radio project, in which microwave-sized radio units could talk to each other at 100 Kbps or sometimes 400 Kbps across 10 miles or so. The tech report on that work may be found at https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien78.pdf
I am retired at the moment. Last time I got bored fairly quickly. I expect that to happen again.
I had been working part time in the Parallel Runtimes Engineering group at Intel, which is part of Developer Software Engineering. I was also working on a few research problems for a government customer via Intel Federal. Intel, in its current retrenchment, dangled a package that was too good to ignore.
What I was doing at PRE was mostly Intel SHMEM, which is an implementation of OpenSHMEM supporting extensions for Intel GPUs. Essentially, SYCL kernels running on your GPU can do PUTs, GETs, atomic operations, and collective operations to GPU memory throughout the entire parallel application.
I am kinda sorta looking around for a part time researchy gig. I like working with smart people and I like to learn new things. Fairly often good things come out of my efforts. See
The Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration could not extend the eviction moratorium, saying that only congress could do so.
I have several opinions:
You know, congress should actually do its job rather than permitting the courts to control policy. I understand that congress doesn’t like to go on record sometimes, but that is their job. I would like to see congressional rule changes that would require roll call votes, and would require the publication of how many people in each congressperson’s district would be affected by their decision. Let there be accountability.
The pandemic has cost a lot of low income people their jobs and access to services like in-person schooling and daycare that let them work at all. Throwing them out on the street in the middle of an ongoing pandemic does not seem like a good thing to do.
Landlords are often rent-seeking lowlifes, but often they rely on rental income to feed their own families. There are some complex programs that permit forbearance of mortgage payments, but landlords also need money for food, for maintenance, to pay the super and the electric and the gas and the garbage collection and the water bills. What are they supposed to do? And some, by virtue of earlier thrift, do not have mortgages. All that lost income is lost. Are they supposed to ask for a new mortgage along with “My tenants aren’t paying rent, so I am not going to pay this mortgage either.”?
I don’t think a lot of the unpaid rent during the eviction moratorium is going to be made up. If you are barely making end meet when you have a job, how are you going to catch up on a year’s unpaid rent when you get your job back?
So I think the eviction moratorium will result in a lot of landlord losses, and if that isn’t a government taking, what is? So congress should consider the matter, and if they don’t want to continue the moratorium they should go on record individually. If they do want to continue the moratorium, but don’t want to pay the landlords for lost rent, then they should go on record individually for that too.
TL:DR Design for graceful failure. Avoid global dependencies.
This past week, millions of Texans were left without power or water during the worst cold snap in a decade. There are so many lessons here.
As I understand it, the bulk of Texas power comes from natural gas. As many people know by now, electric grids cannot store electricity. Supply must equal demand at all times. During the storms, unexpected demand from the cold temperatures met an unexpected lack of generation due to multiple causes, and the only way to keep the grid up at all was to drastically shed load. This is supposed to be an organized process, but things you don’t test test not to work when you need them. Instead of everyone suffering short outages, some people lost power for days.
Texas “conservatives” were quick to blame, for example, AOC (huh?) for this, and then to blame wind power for dropping offline. In fact, wind and renewables account for less than 10% of Texas generation and the availability of renewables was better than fossil and nuclear. The actual cause of a lot of fossil generation losses was a lack of winterized equipment, so instrumentation froze, and a lack of natural gas to power generators, due to … high demand because it was cold and a lack of winterized equipment in the gas industry, so wells froze. It turns out that Texas natural gas generation plants do not store much gas locally, so they had to shut down.
The next problem is water. The low temperatures and lack of winterization caused unexpected pipe and water main breaks, and treatment plants shut down due to lack of power. Shut down plants and low pressure have caused uncertainty about the safety of what water there is, so people are supposed to boil water. Of course they have no electricity or gas, so…?
I think the first lesson for public infrastructure is that you have to spend money to make your system reliable even when conditions are unusual. Cold areas have utilities, water, and electricity that work in subzero temperatures. That part is well understood.
Second, your part of the system must not depend on remote services that you do not control. A water treatment plan must have local emergency power with fuel enough to ride through an extended outage. Gas power plants should either have several days local storage of gas or reliable access to stored gas. Probably you don’t want giant gas storage tanks in the middle of cities.
Third, hospitals, police and so forth must have emergency power and communications that does not depend on outside services.
There has been a lot of humorous writing about Texas’ decision to not join the national grids. I don’t think the interconnections would have been enough to overcome a lack of local generation, but what would have helped is adherence to national standard for reliability. El Paso did winterize their services, according to standards, and they did just fine.
It’s fine with me if Texas wants its own grid, don’t mess with Texas! But it is kind of sensible to track the national standards anyway. Texas had a similar cold event in 2011 or something, and many reports were written and ignored. That part is on Texas politicians.
It is tempting to point out that Republicans claim that government is useless, and then once they get into power proceed to prove it, but I’ll resist.
Here in Massachusetts, the power and gas has been reasonably reliable since the utilities started actually trimming the trees that tend to fall on the wires. Nevertheless, we have a wood stove and a pile of split wood and a 6KW generator that gets used once or twice a year, and a second small generator in case the first one is busted. As soon as we can afford it, we plan to get batteries to be charged by the solar panels on the roof as well. Central utilities are great, but you shouldn’t depend on them 100%.
In computing, there’s a saying that a distributed system is one in which the failure of a machine you didn’t even know existed can keep you from getting your work done.
I think it is quite hard to predict the results of unusual combinations of events. It is much easier to provide backup systems to prevent failures from cascading and becoming disasters. It takes money and periodic testing.
Joe Biden won the election. There was a large turnout, many people voted early and by mail and the election was the cleanest and best run ever. People who believe otherwise have not produced any evidence and have lost in 63 legal challenges, in many states, and many courts, including the supreme court..
Trump has refused to accept a peaceful transition of power, and has incited an actual insurrection that so far has killed six people
Trump has been supported in his rejection of law and the constitution by many Republican Attorneys General, six Republican US Senators, and over 100 Republican Representatives.
Trump should be removed from office immediately, by the 25th amendment or by impeachment and conviction.
Trump should be barred from ever again holding a position of power or honor, either through impeachment and conviction, or by the 14th amendment.
The congressmen and senators who violated their oaths to the constitution must resign or be expelled from the congress.
I think we need a conservative party in this country, and there is a fair amount of evidence that democracies work best when they have two reasonably well balanced groups. The problem I have is that the current Republican party is not conservative and doesn’t believe in democracy. They seem to spend their time trying to deny the right to vote to people who don’t agree with them. This is pretty obvious through gerrymandering efforts and voter suppression efforts.
I think that conservatives should abandon the Republican party and start a new one.
