I don't think you would want any toxic metals in fuel given the risk of sending it into the air. There are probably real industrial uses, though, like reagents for labs.
The land would be the easy part. Hiring a PI, a team of subject matter experts on botany, metallurgy, and genetics, a few skilled lab technicians, a couple programmers or statisticians, an environmental compliance expert, and whoever else I forgot, probably costs more than $1M/yr and ideally there would be more than a single team. I have no idea what reagents and bespoke GMO plants cost, but it can't be cheap.
I am ignorant about agricultural research budgets, but $10M does not seem like a very serious amount to prove the basic concept and, much more importantly, the viability of scaling an industrial process. This is interesting, but I am guessing this is perceived by the program managers as a total moonshot.
They might be better. This is opposed to say, any metropolitan area on earth, where there is no attempt to restore prior conditions at all. I think your argument is essentially an ad-hominem that asserts without evidence that mining companies are evil. I find this a bigotted point of view.
My point is that the permanent disturbance of urbanization should be much more concerning than temporary disturbances.
Western open pit mining operations will have environmental remediation plans that are likely bonded. Eventually, the ecology will go back to normal. Meanwhile, a monstrosity like Los Angeles will remain a massive concrete eye sore for centuries.
This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.
Housing can be very affordable if living in a dense metropolitan area is not a requirement. There are also some efficiency gains happening with design automation and prefabrication that are very slowly creeping into the industry.
I think an immediate option with real benefits would be to provide a small tax advantage for businesses to allow remote/hybrid work. Obviously not everyone can do this, but for those that can, they could live where they can afford to and stop spending hours a day driving to and from an office. Personally, I work at an AEC firm that requires physical presence; however, I have had nearly zero productive in-person interactions in the office. The design team is in another state. Meetings are on MS Teams even when everyone is a few feet aeay from each other. If I talk to anyone, it's purely for the relief of the distraction it provides. I spend no less than 10hr a week commuting.
The criticism in the article seems pretty weak. If the goal was an omniscient oracle, then, yeah, probably not the god you were expecting. However, I don't see how this is not more cost effective than an outsourced call center. Speaking to a person in another country who barely understands my language and has 5 scripted responses can't be an improvement. The article does not even speak to error rates for humans performing the same task.
I want to agree because I see myself in this, particularly the conclusion of the career arc, but I try to remember that market conditions are beyond my control and aren't productive to dwell on.
I had a boss who cut his teeth at one of the largest AEC firms in the US. He frequently said, "the two most dangerous people are an incompetent that everyone gets along with and the highly competent that nobody gets along with. Both can destroy an organization." I knew who he had in mind on the former, which I thought was pretty callous. I realized that he saw me as the latter after I was fired.
I think we should not infer rules about business behavior from market forces because management in large organizations have enough insulation to develop their own hard to explain customs.
I am curious of there is potential for a structural application, like getting the fungi to produce chitin or cellulose. I could imagine providing a light lattice for a structure, spraying it with spores and a nutrient slurry, and then letting it grow and harden into a durable structure.
I am not seeing any mention of a certain US security state 'investor'that gave them a bunch of money and PR, either in the article or in comments. I suppose it's uncouth within polite company to speak of such things.
We now have a single organization shaping the information access patterns of the people all over the world ostensibly paid by ads. Right.
I think this is OK. By extension, the services those knowledge workers provide become trivial costs. World class medical advice doesnt cost $500/hr with a month-long wait. Getting a freeway interchange designed doesn't cost the public $20M and take 5 years. Business logic for large organizations would be handled by something other than a labrynth of excel spreadsheets.
The economy clothes aren't great, but you can get a quality tailored suit for $4000. That's about 6 weeks pay for a PFC in the US Army. A roman legionnaire would pay about a gold ounce for a quality (at the time) set of clothing, however, at the cost of about 6 months pay.
They don't build 'em like they used to, but those of us in the rank and file are getting better off. We can't all be "I think I will just buy Hawaii" rich like Zuckerberg, but quality of life is, overall, improving.
I use plasticity exclusively for 3D printing. I'm a huge fan. I also deeply appreciate a no-nonsense perpetual license for a fair price. You can't define persistent dimensional or relational constraints; however you can iterate and edit so fast that I have never missed it. Part tolerance is off? Grab a surface and pull it in or out to the length you need. If you need highly parametric parts, I might favor OpenSCAD or CadQuery (python), anyway.
I really admire those with the ability to conform themselves to a work place to be successful. I've always been candid, and I am occasionally at odds with management when polite lies are expected. Those I've managed appreciate the sincerity, but I would hardly describe my career as successful.
Sometimes they can. Your provider probably sources power from multiple generators. Some consumers can get power from brokers who sell closer to market rate, rather than a levelized one. Customers usually save money, but pay newspaper-headline-catching premiums when energy is scarce.
To your point, I don't think making physical electrical conductors communal property would be anything less than a disaster. That conductors are most valuable when you have a grid makes the monopoly problem structural in my opinion.
I suspect from the indifference to the details and heavy-handed tone of the article that there is some particular agenda. Saying utilities are just greedy is not very compelling when the legal conditions on their operations are much more complex than most compabies to say the least.
Highway construction standards are much higher than they were 30-50 years ago, but it's a mixed bag. Administrative costs are significantly higher. Survey has dramatically improved with GPS. Highway engineering has not improved since about the 90s. Automated machine guidance has significantly improved the potential accuracy of grading operations in th last decade.
AE is a special case. Procurement law for public agencies in the US requires qualifications-based selection for professional services. The price is then negotiated, but it's basically whatever the consultant says it is as long as they transparently report labor hours. This leads to the majority of effort being labor-intensive make-work pushed to expensive labor categories. There is no market process for discovering efficient service providers. This is part of the reason why workflows for transportation infrastructure design haven't improved in 30 years and probably won't until the legal landscape changes.
A more successful model is to launder a DoD project into a private company (Lifelog to Facebook, for example) and then a leviathan of media flaks can promote the product as the Next Big Thing.
I'm undecided if it would be a net good or bad. If you think government should subsidize infrastructure that creates value that's hard to bill to users (like roads), then software is a pretty logical extension. However, given my personal knowledge of transportation project delivery and the astronomical amount of waste it includes, I suspect this might just make things worse.
The author paints with too broad a brush. There is significant differences in markets that drive these decisions. Cut-and-cover is standard in my state, but the land cost, density, and regulatory environment allow this. Directional drilling and jack-and-bore is very common for small diameter excavation, though.