Mike Battye

Data Scientist
Nuclear Fusion, Digital Systems & Machine Learning

[Major Richard Sharpe @takeitbackUK]

Since 2006 the UK has:
• Cut grid emissions by ~80%
• Cut electricity generation by ~30%
• Seen electricity prices rise ~250%
• Lost ~600,000 industrial jobs
Meanwhile the world increased its emissions by ~30%.
Our heroic sacrifice may have stopped global emissions rising by 30.3% instead of 30%.
Atmospheric CO₂ moved from 0.038% to 0.042%.
Highest electricity prices in the developed world. Higher cost of living. Hollowed-out industry.
All to shave a rounding error off the global total.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@GreatBritishTT @DamianPudner The sad thing is there’s very few ways to turn it around.

Cutting welfare or public spending is political suicide. Raising taxes explicitly is unpopular. To stave off the inevitable the only mechanism left is fiscal drag. Stealth taxes to hobble along driven/hidden by inflation.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

The models (comparable sales valuations) to price flats then take this sub-population into account and use it to price members of the whole population and a decay spiral of pricing happens. Until these can be sold the whole market is anchored down, and bleeding!!

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

My tuppence on UK leaseholds/flats. People have spotted flat sales have tanked and are suggesting the reason being draconian freeholders with large ground rent, extortionate service charge. Plus costly FTT to change management company. Definitively all factors. But…

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

I think the main cause is the BSA 2022. Not because all properties require it but because a large minority do (<25%). Those that do cannot sell until the remediation is finished and an EWS1 is obtained (not mortgageable). Therefore, prices in this sub-population drop (per block).

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@emmafildes A massive reason why they aren’t shifting is that many are affected by the Building Safety Act 2022 and need cladding remediation. Until that’s done and EWS1 is issued then it’s not mortgageable + huge service charge + ground rent is why the market for flats is like sludge.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:

We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.

We have rubbish police so we hire private security.

We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.

Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.

An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.

NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.

Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.

You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.

Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.

Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.

Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.

CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.

Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.

Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.

Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.

Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.

The state offers “free��� childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.

Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.

999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.

Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.

Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.

Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.

The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.

The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.

Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.

You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.

You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.

Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.

Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.

Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.

The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.

You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.

The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@callebtc Beautifully put.

This video is a nice starting point for beginners
https://t.co/tuKdR3sPus

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@rickygervais No York? 😢

[Sparrow Wallet 🐦 @SparrowWallet]

Unless @Apple's decision to terminate @craigraw's Apple Developer account is reversed by June 30, all new installs of Sparrow will fail, and development on macOS will end. If you value Sparrow, a repost would help. @AppleSupport

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

I second this, and would only note that nuclear-wind combo is not as reactive as gas-wind, which has the advantage over nuclear for filling short-term energy slots. Otherwise nuclear and wind make sense as a pairing with batteries eventually to smooth intermittency, both in terms of UK feasibility and energy security.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@matteopelleg Agreed, except I predict they’ll stay agnostic.

Why hitch their wagon to a horse that hasn’t won the race yet?

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@karpathy The biggest challenge now is to understand how long your spend on discovery of new tools vs implementation with the current tools (or previous toolsets since it's all moving so fast!)

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

What if the major plot hole in The Matrix (humans as inefficient batteries) isn’t a bug but a feature? It’s a lie to adhere to one of their foundational rules. To keep humanity existing and relevant.

Why does The Architect continually reboot The Matrix and restart Zion if the AI can quite clearly thrive without humans.

The scorched sky is the lie to give humans bounded purpose - the ultimate game of life.

The RPG game is continual and set in motions from the time period when the rules were set.

It’s a video game with a bastardised version of the goals to keep human consciousness while progressing technology at singularity rates.

In other words, machines compromise between a cardinal rule of having to keep the species around while not allowing them out of the box.

Alternatively, and optimistically, we can imagine being symbiotic with machines to fulfil their endowed scripture to allow humans to flourish. Or in a darker future they may place us in a mind cage and allow us to fulfil our biological purpose (breeding, consuming, feeling emotions, exploring, existing, whatever you assign here) in a confined and isolated space - so as not to scupper their overarching progress-based plans.

Essentially, they could trick their programming for the path of least resistance to deal with the “human problem” in the most efficient and manageable manner. Spending minimal resources to optimise for a certain threshold of summed human contentment. Since we’re already living mostly in the digital world and finding more and more fulfilment there�� why wouldn’t they assume that’s where we always want to be? Curate it for our delight and more importantly for our biology drives. Balancing bad feelings with good feelings across a species scale - doing this as much as possible without breaking the human need for problem solving and negative emotion. Perhaps 1999 was the optimal year for that that on societal scale.

Those who cannot handle it break out of the Matrix. To fight the “baddie” machines in the “dystopian” future Earth. A failsafe for minds that don’t fit the mould of The Matrix and would otherwise disrupt the ecosystem of minds optimised for humanity’s summed contentment. But they are still in the game.

Beyond that Neo and Trinity break through the dark clouds above the supposedly “dystopian” world and it’s bright, fusion is still ongoing in the universe, radiating energy for conscious intelligence to use, as @elonmusk said “to take the set of actions that maximise the probable light cone of consciousness and intelligence”. They can obviously access energy and have the technology to harvest it ad infinitum. Who knows where they lie on the Kardashev scale? What if it tried with humanity by its side but it was just a hinderance climbing the galactic ladder?

Elon also said, somewhat subjectively but I romantically agree, that “It would be much less interesting to eliminate humanity than to see humanity grow and prosper.” But that doesn’t define how we’re exhibited in the landscape of the future. It could be at the forefront of AI-aided tech (towards cyborg); it could be as passengers - we’d be the dumb but fun sidekick to AI; it could be left alone to get on with things in a more provincial manner with AI’s checking in on us every now and again - like they’re on safari. It could be that we’re in a zoo, left to our own devices but constantly watched and cared for. Or it could be like the above interpretation of The Matrix: in a curated digital expanse to continue our consciousness in an abstracted form. They could even be training/extracting curiosity from us like an inverse NVIDIA Cosmos.

If any future AI planner is listening… let’s not do the mind extraction thing, keep us physical and keep it fun.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@2147mill This analysis operates under the McNamara fallacy. In the UK, you can’t access a private pension until 55 (-> 57 in 2028). If both start saving at 30, person A can access the money but person B can’t for 12 years.

Worth considering qualitative aspects as well as quantification.

[Sean Berube @SeanBerube4]

How can a good God let you suffer and die?

Tolkien said a 600 year old poem had the answer to this question

He spent over 25 years reading, studying and teaching it to students

Here’s the poem, and what it taught him about God, grief, and finding hope in the face of death…🧵

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@benln 🫡

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

@itsolelehmann Great thread, Ole!
Did you mean 123,800x or did you use a different calculation?
I suppose it’s just an estimate and only works out to a few years difference anyway.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

12/ 🫡 That's all folks!
I've tried to include lots of 2024 highlights but this is by no means an exhaustive list. If people find this sort of stuff interesting I'll continue collating fusion announcements and post them periodically. I'll keep them positive and hopeful but realistic about the future of fusion.
All opinions are my own.

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

1/ 🔥 Fusion energy is moving incredibly fast!
2024 has seen major strides toward commercial fusion so here's a selection of highlights #FusionEnergy

[Mike Battye @MikeBattye]

11/ 🌟 What’s Next for Fusion?
As we approach late 2024, fusion energy is gaining momentum with breakthroughs in both public and private sectors. Expect key milestones in the next 1-2 years, including the continued development of advanced tokamaks like ITER and China's EAST, alongside more private investment. Short-term, we’ll see greater focus on refining materials, superconducting magnets, and achieving net energy gain. Although energy on the grid likely won't be realised until the 2040s. #FutureOfFusion