Federal highway officials hate us, tell local and state officials they must stop using humor and pop culture references on their road safety signs because they might ‘distract.’ That’s the point. You get people to pay attention. Also you brighten up their day. I sincerely despise people who issue rules like this. How do we fight back?

I strongly agree with the highway officials here. These are highway signs meant to warn of traffic problems, altered commute times, or potential hazards. Most of the time they are blank or (at least my area) they give commute times to major landmarks. In either case, they are not 'surprising' and unlikely to distract drivers, but still provide value.

On the other hand, when they show a novel message (whether a specific hazard warning, road closure, or corny joke) people pay special attention to them. Anecdotally, I've found that novel messages that require interpretation slow down traffic.

Using the signs to display stupid safety messages dilutes their intended purpose, causes delays, and reduces safety by distracting drivers (directly opposing their message). Those messages were awful and I'm glad they're gone.

With reinvested dividends and rising price, it simply grew to become one of my bigger positions. I invested in a variety of industries and this is how it ended up. I did consciously increase my positions in NVDA, MSFT, TQQQ, and GOOG (Google) in light of recent AI advances though.

I'm the OP of that bigfoot discussion on r/ssc. My views haven't substantially changed on that subject.

I agree with the great-grandparent that aliens being real is an enormously bigger change from the standard worldview than bigfoot being real.

I give < 10% likelihood to these UAPs being genuine aliens as stereotypically imagined, and < 50% likelihood of being some significant scientific update (e.g. weather phenomenon, spoofing technology).

However, assuming actual aliens in spaceships were here and trying halfheartedly to hide from us, I would expect the photo and video evidence to be about as crap as it is. So I agree with the conclusion of this OP, but disagree with the rationale.

Edit 19-JUN-2023: Upon reflection, I think assigning <10% likelihood is overconfident of me. I realized this when I read the recent post asking for UAP bets https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up and thought about the real reasons why I wouldn't take the bet.

It's discussed in the Reddit comments, if you want more details, but briefly: A rare species with a long life might leave on the order of ~100 dead a year. If each corpse has, say 1e-5 chance (low but still plausible number) of being found by a person, then it could take a while.

I don't know of any claim that they would take care of their dead, but I don't see that as implausible.

If they exist, then they would have crossed the Bering land bridge at the same time as humans. They would never have lived anywhere without a human presence. And yes, similar sightings are known from across Asia also.

I wouldn't say I know it to be true, but read and reviewed books by experts (anthropologists, special effects experts, pro and con) and ended up concluding that bigfoot probably exists (~75%).

I wrote up my rationale in r/slatestarcodex a year or so ago:

link

Some more thoughts pertaining to limits of detection:

The Milky Way weighs 5.8e11 times M*, which itself is 2e30kg. Total mass of the galaxy = 1.2e42kg.

If all that mass were converted to energy with perfect efficiency, say via black hole evaporation, or annihilation with antimatter, then that's a total of 1.0e59 joules.

That many joules over 5 billion years (1.5e17 s) is a power of 7e41 watts. At a radius of 7 billion light years (6.6e25m), that's an energy flux of 1.3e-11 W/(m*m).

The sun puts out about 1400 W/(m*m)at our distance. So the sun would be about 1e14 times brighter than this distant galaxy trying to get our attention. Move the sun 1e7 x farther away to about 158 light years to match this brightness, and you get a ~8.5 magnitude star, never visible without aid. (Note: If using 1000x as much energy it becomes a clearly visible star and among our top 20 or so.)

So, if a type III civilization were using the entire mass-energy of 1 galaxy with 100% efficiency and used this resource to signal continuously for 5 billion years, they would not be bright enough to see unaided. We would still probably notice the light as a third-rate star if it wasn't blocked by dust.

How could they make it unusual enough to be noticed as a signal? Perhaps the signal has a complete blackbody spectrum, but they surround the galaxy with an unusual spectral absorption signature. Example: Surrounding the galaxy they could have concentric clouds of He, Li, B, N, Na, Al, etc. The elements with a prime atomic number.

That's unusual enough to draw attention. Maybe they could even encode a message in the degree of absorption.

I may be misunderstanding: Are you suggesting a targeted beam to the habitable zone of every star they can see?

If so, I don't see how that could work, considering that most stars visible at time of transmission would be dead by the time the transmission reaches them. Also the fact that they have orthogonal velocity that would be difficult or impossible to measure and account for.

My apologies if I have misunderstood.

I expect we don't notice most of them. We may notice a lot more the next few decades though. Some would still probably be hidden behind dust.