njarboe

The same was probably said when machines started making furniture, cloth, harvesting wheat, etc. A desk made custom by a human to your specs is cool, beautiful, and life giving for both involved. And will cost $10-$50k. Maybe with the AIs and robots doing the grunt work, humans could get back to building things for each other. That would be great but I'm not sure what percentage of people are interested in that though.

A printed list in her purse has certain beneficial properties that a password manager does not.

A big problem is bright screens and displays inside of cars at night. Your night vision never kicks in so you need extra bright lights to see, thus these bright lights that only light up a small section of the road. The more dispersed and even lighting of the old lights is so much better.

Blame the chicken tax.

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued."

This automation happened between around 1910 and 1930. With WWI, the great depression, WWII, Communist Russia, failure of the gold standard, etc., some argue that is when civilization died.

Dark Unknown Matter would be a better name for lay people to understand what's going on. I'm no cosmologist but isn't it just a placeholder for something that gravity interacts with (and not much else) and we don't know what it currently is. When we discover what it is the name will change.

Agreed. My brother is a painter and has commented, "At least in the past cheap tools were one-time-use, now they are usually zero-time-use. Built so poorly they don't even work out of the box."

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era):

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.

Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff.

The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties.

Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership posts, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.

One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

Would like to see such a system in action. Have any examples? Most go horribly wrong.

Early United States was pretty good but having a western frontier with "free" land was probably the enabling factor that no longer exists.

It would be great if everyone felt and was in a major way in control of their life. Equal before the law and not much law. The people who want to create "equality" by preventing people from accumulating wealth also want to accumulate power in the state. A tiny fraction of people will also be running a socialist state.

Aristocrats are going to aristocrat, as they say.

What does inequality even mean? Everyone must be identical? The idea of removing inequality is dystopian.

"deeper shared community goals and aspirations"

When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.

I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).

Any scientific paper that does not document how things were done (methodologies) is basically worthless in the search for truth.

Wow. Electricity prices went up 8x in Britain since 2005. How can industry there compete internationally?

Lots of tech gets discovered, is heavily patented, and then 20 years late,r when that large first round of patents expire, people start working on and developing the tech.

Yes. If you send an email from a protonmail account to a gmail account that email is in google's system. Same if in the other direction. Would anyone using protonmail not know this. I would guess at least 99.9% of proton users understand this.

I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.

It probably could have been true if regulations were not written that said if your nuclear power is going to be cheaper than other sources you have to spend on safety features until it's not cheaper.

Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.

Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.

"in people who don't need it from a marginal consumption standpoint".

We need the rich to spend more money. There are plenty of cool ways to do this. Build a mile high pyramid on a Nevadan playa, a canal to the Sea of Cortez to re-flood the Salton Sea, humans on other planets, new city states a la Praxis, interstellar probes, etc.

Some billionaires are doing some of these things. Hope more do in the future.

Agreed. This would get rid of borrow against gains to spend tax free. But also just get rid of the income tax, it is the worst way to tax, and do a land value tax.

Over the last five years Tesla has made a profit of about $41 billion while BYD has had a loss of about $13 Billion. Would rather be the Apple of electric cars than always selling them at a loss.

Tesla's biggest factory is in China.

“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?”

I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.

Happened constantly till around 1970. One horse power used to take a horse. Now a very small electric motor for cents per day.

Yes if we could only build them. I recently learned there was one built from the Columbia river hydro projects to southern California in the early 1970's Has one been built since?

One could hope with improving tech and decreasing regulations we could have decreasing (nominal) energy prices in the future. That would be progress.

I imagine you had good reason not to, but this is a situation for a lawsuit. Did you sue Amazon to get your money?

Few people just want to burn fossil fuels, they want to do things with energy. Focus should be on making non-CO2 emitting energy cheap and abundant. Most people against burning fossil fuel are also not promoting more and cheaper energy use.