"Once the owning class owns mostly everything and has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them."
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
Eh, this assumes the billionaires aren't much for preemptive genocide. Since WWII people have been kind of tame on war crimes in relation to our technological capabilities.
>I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.
This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full.
Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.
This sub optimal system is what has (at times) led to massive growth of disruptive technologies and platforms.
People got reasonably mad at Apple’s iron fisted control of the App Store and access to its platforms.
It got to the point that there was political will to force Apple to change. (Sort of, in some circumstances)
But during the golden age of the App Store, when Angry Birds came out—-it wasn’t something people were hemming and hawing about the fairness of distribution platforms it was more like: “wow! iPhone! Check out this game! Everyone is playing this thing, Jack White is playing it. You too can have this game for a few bucks, can you believe this?”
It is only after Apple had ridden the horse a good long while and reaped what came to be outsized profits and using the thing to control competition over an extended period that something really was done about it. (Sort of)
There are many other examples of this kind of thing.
Compensated creative expression has somewhat relied on it in the form of intellectual property, which has built in albeit relatively toothless expiration.
But even IP is under greater threat than ever with gen AI. Just look at what fans are doing with the Star Wars franchise on YouTube right now.
Anyhow, I agree with the system is flawed but I mean to point out that deciding a person or company has reaped enough for their thing is something we do on a case by case basis.
It is not easy to say when to say to someone or something has been compensated “enough.”
How much profit do they deserve exactly? How exactly is it calculated, and who decides how it is calculated? These questions aren't in bad faith, I'm genuinely curious how people with your world view would answer them.
I don't have an answer, but I don't think the framing should be about what they deserve or not. It should be around how much money an individual can have/control before it becomes detrimental to society.
> You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort
Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.”
Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client?
That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.
They are rewarded, yeah. And then they could retire, or they could take that money and put it towards more good ideas, like what Elon has done his entire life.
If we don't have a system for that, then how would you incentivize people to take on bigger risks, bigger projects, etc?
Also, should the lottery not be a thing? What exactly are you advocating by this line of reasoning?
Imagine that making a ground-breaking discovery in physics came with a prize of a billion dollars. One good idea, and you can retire. Would that not harm science? Many scientists would keep working after their first prize because it's what they love to do. Some would accuse them with being greedy after they've made a few more discoveries. "Hey, leave some money for the rest of us!"
What I'm trying to get at is that the rewards for certain things are badly out of whack with what is necessary to keep people both rewarded and motivated. At least, in terms of what is healthy for society and progress. In general, the closer people are to the money the more unreasonable the rewards are. Perhaps people who are further from the money but who contribute just as much (or more) to society are right to be concerned.
P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.
> P.S. Musk bought companies with people who had a lot of good ideas and convinced governments (mainly the U.S. government) to pay for it. He's always been a capital guy, not an idea guy. He desperately wants to be in idea guy, but his ideas are things like re-branding Twitter to X and the Cybertruck.
Personally speaking, I am sympathetic to the idea that billionaires (especially Musk) are often created more by government policy than market forces. Although for some reason the push to stop governments minting billionaires by fiat seems rather weak, which makes me think a lot of people are being disingenuous on the topic. Or maybe just haven't thought about it much. There is a bizarre zeitgeist where first the government has to give a man billions of dollars because something needs to happen ASAP, then they have to take the billions away because nobody thought the thing needed to happen all that urgently.
There is an overlap in the vibe between the people who are unhappy that the government rewarded Musk and the people who, at the time, were clamouring that the rewards for things Musk was doing were too low. 10, 20 years ago it was all "there isn't enough funding for electric vehicles", "world is literally ending from climate change" and "who is going to put money into batteries".
I'm not saying capital guys have no place. Should they be rewarded to the tune of a trillion dollars though, especially if most of it ultimately came from government coffers? That seems extreme to me.
The people closest to the money are the people who have the most control over how and who its allotted to. We really ought to watch them more carefully.
So how much should they be rewarded? You suggest a cap? What prevents someone that's more poor than you deciding that you nobody needs to make more money than them, so now you should make less money?
Your narrative is self contradictory. In your own theory of what happened, Musk was the idea guy, not the capital guy! You said the government provided the capital. Why did the government provide the capital to Musk rather than GM or Boeing or Rockwell? Because he was the one who could actually develop what the government wanted to support.
It’s rewriting history to call Musk a “capital guy.” Tesla and SpaceX entered markets with huge, established competitors. Those companies had access to virtually unlimited capital. But EVs and commercial space travel were pipe dreams before Musk got involved. I graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering pre-SpaceX and the field was moribund. Your options were going to Boeing to make airliners 1% more efficient every decade or going to Lockheed or Rockwell to design better missiles for blowing up brown people. The idea that SpaceX was just about a “capital guy” coming in is 100% hindsight bullshit.
You’re also just completely factually wrong about “most of” anything “coming out of government coffers.” The government gave Tesla a $485 million loan that was fully repaid. SpaceX received about $500 million in grants. In both cases, that was a small fraction of the money invested into the companies. Tesla’s cumulative net loss was $6 billion before profitability. SpaceX’s cumulative net loss is $42 billion.
At most you have a fair argument that the government should take equity in companies instead of providing grants with no strings attached. But that would just mean that maybe the government should have a 10% share of SpaceX or whatever.
Should the author of a tool like jqwik have the right to control how it's used?
We know what the opinion of AI companies is. Authors who do not consent to their works being scanned and used have been completely ignored. If you're a vibe coder, you might back the AI companies up and call Link a "douche".
On the other hand, if we ignore the requests of humans who create new, useful things and put them out there for free, might they stop? We're not entitled to their work after all.
> if we ignore the requests of humans who create new, useful things
The author of this tool consented when he choose a license that allowed such things. If he wasn't ok with it he should have chosen a different license. Intentionally creating booby-traps is unacceptable in all circumstances.
If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data.
Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
This is in no way a solution to the population-scale problem of a belligerant nation having root on the citizenry's mobile phones/cameras/GPS units/network scanners
Something with ~0% market share outside of China and which trades the US having root for China having root is not a viable alternative.
In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point.
Which means the thing it calls for is something open source, since that both allows contributions from multiple countries and solves the trust issue by leaving no single entity in control of it.
One of the ironies of the TikTok-China discussion was that as an individual in the US, I would much prefer the Chinese govt have access to all my data over the U.S. government, just like I suspect individuals in China would be much better off if the U.S. government had all their data over the Chinese government.
So giving your data to the Chinese government, while not a great solution, may still be preferable over giving it to the U.S. for someone in the EU given the closer relationship between EU governments and the U.S. than EU governments and the Chinese government.
Of course, this may be the opposite of what you want from a national perspective.
If the USA were to ever weaken into irrelevance then yes messing with foreign HarmonyOS users might have some possibility that can’t be easily dismissed.
As long as the USA doesn’t become completely toothless then the incentives would point in the opposite… as long as Huawei behave scrupulously they are nearly guaranteed to win and dethrone the incumbents for most of the world.
The US has already banned Huawei from doing business in the US.
Moreover, everybody knows how the enshittification cycle works at this point. They don't openly betray you when they have 0.3% market share, they just fit you for a noose that gets tighter as their market power increases. But because everybody now expects that to happen, who is going to use it to begin with if it's not open source and correspondingly resistant to rug pulls?
Viability is debatable. There are tens of millions of smartphone users in the US who are vastly more exposed to US law-enforcement abuses and intrusiveness than anything China would care to try. Chinese emigres excepted.
In other words China doesn't have to be trustworthy as long as the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.
You could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)
You are naiive and/or stupid. And/or gaslighting. Most likely the latter since you have to sugarcoat your message with trailing emoji.
UBS tried to hold for as long as they could, and the choice the US given them is "pay a fine (accrues daily) or be cut from world financial system run by dollar".
UBS ultimately paid a 780 million fine. The rest of Swiss banks followed suit immediately.
Many things in the world happen, and most of the dumb bullshit that happens is imposed by US. This naiivete has to stop, the times have changed, and you, you spefically are part of the problem.
> Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
The Swiss didn't vet their clients. If Vladimir Putin wants to contract a data centre on your soil for the privacy, you can always have regulations that say, "No.".
The entire premise of "other countries can trust your companies to protect their privacy" is that you can't. "US reads Dutch emails" is the thing you have to not do.
You can be strict about who you do business with while still respecting their privacy once they are set up.
The respectable, politically popular country setting this up would simply say yes to the International Criminal Court, but no to Putin.
This doesn't work well as a blacklist of "everyone's allowed unless they turn out to be sanctioned", because some shell company or reseller could register and actually be a front for Russia or whatever other bogeyman. But just serving enormous respectable organisations is a big niche in itself.
But now you're proposing something that doesn't solve the problem for the vast majority of people, since nearly everyone is neither the International Criminal Court nor Vladimir Putin.
It might solve it for the majority of people by compute use, though. Charge $100,000 one time auditing fee to get approved for it. For a Fortune 500 company or EU government agency or a big NGO that's nothing.
One-time anything doesn't work for security, not least because if they're trying to betray you they can change whatever they want as soon as your auditors leave the premises.
Notice also that you're only handling the entities large enough to do things in-house to begin with. Meanwhile one of the biggest problems here is industrial espionage, which is to say startups with interesting new technology.
> It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
Depends on what that theoretical country would offer. Some kind of strong constitutionally-enshrined protections for privacy and perhaps from tyranny-of-the-majority exploiting upper-middle class like all other western countries and with strong IT jobs market? Are you kidding, sign me up!
I chose Antarctic as an example because it is one of few places on Earth with significant uninhabited land where one could theoretically establish a new sovereign state. Are you implying that all popular green energy technologies are somehow unfeasible there?
Yes, the "somehow" is that no one want to live there, and the associated expense of building there probably outweighs the benefits. I'm also sceptical you could establish a new sovereign state there.
If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.
That is just like, your opinion, man? I personally find it a very poor experience talking to someone over high latency connection when we tend to always start talking over each other.
The question is, is that really only due to data center geo? I am always amazed how low latency and high quality Facetime between Europe <-> Australia is. Seems like good engineering can overcome less optimal geographics.
I find that hard to believe. Are you implying that Apple is running their own fiber network providing low-latency connection between Europe and Australia? Or what kind of "good engineering"?
I can vouch for GP's exact experience. Facetime does feel much smoother than other videocalling apps for Aus<>Europe. Of course they don't run their own fiber network. The good engineering is making it feel smooth and good despite that. At its core, nothing about computing is smooth. Everything is based on making it feel that way, using countless techniques.
What "techniques"? Audio/video over high-latency connection is not a computer game where there all all kinds of latency compensation techniques - several meeting participants start speaking at the same time, realize they do only after RTT, stop, then awkwardly wait for a moment and repeat hoping for no "collision", rinse-repeat. Everyone who often has meetings with participants connecting from different continents knows what I'm talking about. But you can have this in beautiful high-definition "smooth" 4K if bandwidth is high enough, yes.
the reply here is .. any software can really perform badly.. it takes some effort to not perform badly. the default gravity is to be buggy and bad performance. The parent-post is right there are hundreds of small parts and they all have to do well to accomplish "live video and audio across half the globe"
The collection of metadata is almost certainly bad for people even if they do nothing wrong. It can (and will) be sold if regulations and enforcement are not airtight. It will almost certainly be leaked as a result of incompetence, negligence, or outright criminality. The only way to prevent your metadata from getting out into the great unknown is to ensure it isn't collected in the first place.
If you don't see what the big deal is, I suggest you consider the recent leak of voter data in Alberta. For those unfamiliar, a list of eligible voters is routinely shared with political parties for the purposes of running their election campaigns. One of those parties, the "Republican Party of Alberta", shared their copy of the list with separatists, who made it freely available to any of their pals. What's the big deal you ask? Who cares if their address is public knowledge? Isn't this the sort of thing that used to be in phonebooks? Just for one example, anyone who has moved away from an abusive ex now has to worry about their address, phone number, etc. being made available to that abusive ex. Privacy isn't just important for people who like wearing pants.
C-22 is supposed to protect Canadians but, instead, it endangers them. This is a bad bill.
This is bold considering the uncertainty in the Canadian market right now.
For those not familiar with the situation...
Before Trump 2.0:
----------------
The auto sectors of Canada, U.S. and Mexico were highly integrated with parts and vehicles crossing the border at scale. There wasn't much EV production and the NA auto sector probably wasn't up to competing with the Chinese auto sector on prices, but there were steep tariffs keeping Chinese vehicles out of NA markets and many foreign ones too. The highly integrated nature of the sector was seen, by most, as a competitive advantage.
Trump 2.0:
---------
Trump wanted vehicles to be manufactured in the U.S., not Canada or Mexico. Because... reasons. He slapped sectoral tariffs (that violate CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC) on cars and parts from Mexico and Canada. His desire seems to be to cut Canada and Mexico out of the NA auto supply chain but somehow still force Canada and Mexico to buy only American, while maintaining tariffs on Chinese autos. It's not exactly easy or quick to just pick up an auto plant and move it, nor is it clear that being inside the U.S. tariff wall is better than being outside of it. These tariffs have mostly just caused the NA auto sector to become really uncompetitive right when people are starting to notice that Chinese autos are offering a lot more bang for the buck.
Canada responds:
---------------
Canada now allows in 49,000 autos to enter the country without facing the former 100% tariff rate. This was in exchange for China lifting tariffs on some Canola products. That's a small fraction of the Canadian auto market, but it's also 49,000 cars that won't be from the U.S. (or Canada). This prompted Trump to suggest that China will not allow Canada to play ice hockey anymore[1]... Hockey aside, this move has sent a message. If Trump does succeed in completely strangling the Canadian auto sector, why would Canada continue to give U.S. autos preferential access to their largest export market?
The uncertainty going forward:
-----------------------------
Is China's foothold in the Canadian market secure? Is it a bargaining chip that might be traded away, or is it permanent? Are trade talks between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico going to go so poorly that the 49,000 number gets upped significantly? China's response to this door cracking open is, evidently, to ram their foot in as fast as they can. A new EV brand or two would likely not make a huge impact in Canada, but a new rapid charging network might make itself indispensable in very short order. It's not like the U.S. has a response for this. Their main EV brand, Tesla, is poison in Canada because of Musk's links to Trump.
In Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed.
The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public.
If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough.
e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop.
Some have touted the U.S. as having achieved "energy independence" because of its status as net exporter of oil. This is premature. The U.S. is marginally a net exporter. However, it still imports a lot of oil. It just exports slightly more than it imports.
So, if the world markets gets too dicey, it'd be easy to just cut off the export taps and keep all that oil for Americans, right? Not so fast! First, it's the wrong types of oil in the wrong places. The U.S. doesn't have the infrastructure to transport that domestic oil to where it needs to be, nor the refining capacity to handle it. There's also the pesky issue of enforcing export bans and lower domestic pricing of oil. Go look up Canada's "National Energy Program" from the 80's to see what sort of things might come with that strategy.
If world oil markets go nuts, the U.S. is still very exposed. Putting up a wall would require pipelines and refineries that would take decades to build and policies that could tear apart the country. Americans have a president who is both committed to destabilizing world oil markets and opposing electrification that might reduce the impact of that instability. That's a dangerous combination.
The US on net exports 2.5M barrels a day, or roughly 10% of its total consumption, and the majority of its imports are from countries like Canada that are themselves net exporters and would be unlikely to retaliate against a US export ban.
There are definitely technical issues with refinery capacity, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable if the US seriously wanted to attempt an export ban, even in the short term. The fallout from the rest of the world in the form of other trade retaliations would likely be very serious though.
> There are definitely technical issues with refinery capacity, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable
If they were cheap or easy to solve, don’t you think US refineries would have already converted to support domestic crude? Domestic crude is cheaper than imported crude, the only reason to import is because it so expensive to convert a refinery. My, admittedly very limited, understanding is that you generally don’t convert refineries, it’s cheaper and easier to just build a new one that targets a new type of crude. Building refineries takes a few years, they’re not something you throw together in a few months when oil markets go crazy.
Looking at nationwide statistics is also a bit misleading because nobody is average. Under that scenario, oil consumers are exposed and oil producers will win big.
It's more interesting to ask, "Does AI need to follow the current model of evil megacorps building massive data centres that, collectively, guzzle more energy than most nations on Earth?"
Perhaps LLM's (or something better) will develop to be more efficient and quickly become something most people run on local hardware. Perhaps fad-obsessed management types will move onto the next big thing and AI will start being used more judiciously. Perhaps society will set sane regulatory limits that shape the direction AI is going in, from models that take jobs people want to models that, given the right hardware, can do the jobs few want.
Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to succeed for AI to succeed. If they turn out to be a bubble that bursts and torches a lot of investors, it might actually be a fundamentally good thing for everybody else.
To be clear, nobody WANTS to have to go build all these datacenters. Well, maybe some pure-play hyperscalers do. But there's an immense amount of economic incentive to be able to do this more efficiently, capital and energy. And, what those hyperscalers want will not matter for a second if there isn't demand for the tokens output by those datacenters - they'll go instantly dark and have to seek new forms of valuable compute to offer.
If this current building spree ends in massive solar and other power generation being overbuilt and cutting energy costs, we've had a really good outcome.
This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest
If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison.
Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point - the point is they know that terrestrial electric infra can't sustain the growth they need
> In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. “It just wasn’t practical,” he says. “Not even close.” But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink’s and Tesla’s technologies and capabilities.
It really doesn't. You're purely relying on radiation fins to carry heat away, which are incredibly inefficient.
> The radiator surface area problem also scales uncomfortably. At 838 watts per square meter, rejecting 1 megawatt of waste heat requires roughly 1,200 square meters of radiator. Deploying that much surface area on a satellite is a structural engineering challenge that gets harder with every order of magnitude. The ISS solar arrays span about 2,500 square meters total.
So even a 2MW data centre in space requires a cooling array rivalling the international space station.
Starcloud launched a single H100 in November and they were unable to run it 24/7 due to heat buildup.
Even with novel solutions to make heat transfer to the fins more efficient, like phase-change liquids, the limiting factor is that the vacuum of space is a tremendous insulator.
It's literally a deflection mechanism to the fact they want to build data centers all over the land by proposing a fantastical better way that simply won't work.
That has been covered to death since months, there is no good solution to cooling without an atmosphere. But even going into the technical details is a waste of time, think about how complicated maintaining such a system in space would be compared to having it on earth, the whole idea is a complete grift from beginning to end. There is literally no benefit to do it in space other than as a marketing tool.
Nobody who suggests the idea has ever presented a model that is even remotely close to reality
What a surprise that something this implausible could come from the same guy who proposed trains that run in vacuum tubes.
I can't believe the people who actually listen to this guy can tie their own shoelaces. And somehow he became the richest person on earth. Humans are irredeemable.
- Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods.
- Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was.
- The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
> The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
This is a double edged sword, though. You have extremely knowledgeable people who can't teach because they have an actual degree in their subject matter but not in education. Also stuff like PE teachers teaching physics because they have the required education degree already and they can't find any physicists with them.
----------------
This assumption is not necessarily valid. If things get bad enough for the masses, things will become even worse for billionaires. Inequality fuels revolution. Bunkers and security bots will not save them.
To put it another way, if you have command of the resources to do whatever you want, does it make sense to use them in such a way that your future is to cower in an underground bunker?
reply