I think there can be something else to it; Magic, in most stories, requires tremendously less infrastructure. It takes some years of study and a short chant, say, to create a fireball.

To make a flamethrower takes some years of study, a couple of mines, thousands of people, manufacturing capability, etc. There's a lot more personal effectiveness in magic.

Disclaimer: I'm a mechanical engineer that spends most of my time on software these days. I can make all sorts of intersesting things, but the appeal of being an archwizard is definitely there.

I'd like to see the executive functioning post. Your formatting and article flow seems quite good to me.

Your interactive post asks for money and has a disclaimer about "willing to give credit card number to an organization I trust". I think you might need a little more confidence here to ask for actual money, or perhaps a little more description on the other end.

"Buy this thing that might not work and I haven't described to you but could be amazing!" is a pretty big barrier to participation.

Lowering the retirement age also increases the number of people receiving pensions and other retirement benefits; many of those benefits are underfunded (depending on country) and quite expensive to pay out.

New, young workers also tend to come in at lower pay scales than older workers leave. Those two effects can plausibly increase the cost to government of retirement, so they don't want people to retire early. That might also function as a wealth transfer from elderly people to corporations (or shareholders) too.

I think that the idea is good, and the engineering is fine for back-of-the-envelope, but can we please call it a "vault" or something instead of a grave? Cryonics already has an image problem, and we don't want to suggest the people in the grave are permanently dead.

I can verify that these places are accessible, and that the permafrost extends quite a bit farther south than one might expect. I used to live just south of the Yukon territory.

There are regular long-haul trucks that go up there all year round; if you go in winter, you can use an ice road to get to the very cold and remote places. Given the regular volume of traffic, I'd say the cost is not prohibitive. I can get precise figures if you'd like.

Now Eliezer,

"Verðandi" is rather a stretch for us, especially when we don't watch anime or read manga. Norse mythology, okay. The scary part for me is wondering how many people are motivated to build said world. Optimized for drama, this is a pretty good world.

You have a nice impersonal antagonist in the world structure itself, most of the boring friction is removed... Are you sure you don't want to be the next Lovecraft?

Maybe I've missed this too, but it seems that Eliezer is describing electrons as a property of the amplitude flow.

Then the electrons are identical because they follow from a certain configuration, they are not things-in-themselves. That's a very strong claim, and sufficient to handle "there might be something we don't know about electrons".

Unless I've misunderstood the whole thrust of the posts, which is possible.