> This would serve as an effective frontier, like that which the United States used to have, giving families a failsafe in case of hardship. This implicit safety net for new or recovering families naturally favors a distributist small-owner model of business.
This is probably the weakest part of the article. The frontier is not a safety net. You do not go to the frontier because you are in the poorhouse, you leave the frontier for the poorhouse after you have failed at a nearly insurmountable task. Even today this plays out again and again, people imagine that they can start their life over on a farm and earn a living with their hands, very few succeed. The biggest cost of starting a homestead is not the land but the sheer amount of labour and money that goes into improving that land to the point where it can provide for you. Even the basics of clean water, sanitation, power/heat and shelter would be beyond anyone in need of a failsafe. Add to this the insult of the available land being that which is so marginal that already established businesses cannot make it productive and you have a complete non-starter.
If you think that the marginal periphery will consist of abandoned homes instead and that all one would have to do is move in then I'd invite you to visit a few of the existing abandoned homes in your area. Mind you, not unoccupied homes which generally still have an owner that does at least the basic upkeep necessary to avoid fines. Visit a truly abandoned home where the owner has simply walked away. Unless you're coming in hot on their heals, it's going to be a disaster. Cold weather alone will ruin an unheated structure built to modern standards not to mention the toll that wildlife, plants, and vandals can take. Modern, draft free buildings will also develop a significant mold problem if their power is disconnected since no heat and no air circulation mean that temperature changes will produce condensation.
That's a terrible analogy, nuclear weapons are more akin to everyone being armed with grenades and trapped in the same room. You're going to get hit no matter what so as soon as one person pulls a pin their target is going to do the same and everyone is getting hit by shrapnel.
> NATO need merely declare it has no offensive ambitions. Which it doesn’t. Then there’s no existential threat.
Let's examine that from a counterfactual standpoint. Let's say that during the invasion of Iraq Russia had decided to impose a no fly zone and then proceeded to shoot down American aircraft when they violated it. They of course declared that they have no offensive ambitions, they're simply helping to defend a sovereign nation against a larger aggressor. Would that have caused the United States to attack Russian forces?
> I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up
This is the part you should be concerned about even if a nuclear winter doesn't or can't occur. Ask yourself how many people were alive at the end of the 19th century / early 20th and then compare that to today. Remember that it wasn't for lack of trying and that this was pre-birthcontrol. Then imagine what would happen if you saddled that technology level with 2x, 3x, or 4x the number of mouths to feed.
After a nuclear war the biggest killer would likely be famine. We never think about it since we have escaped it's clutches for so long but it is one of the biggest killers in human history. A nuclear war would destroy our current global supply chain and likely much of the national supply chain as well. Billions of people around the world would starve.
Interesting ideas and worth pursuing but currently my favoured approach for terraforming Mars would be by bombarding it with asteroids and comets. We can do this with technology that already exists, we just need to mass produce rockets capable of reaching the required material and fund the project somehow, maybe with a single platinum rich asteroid returned to Earth orbit. Bombarding Mars will have multiple benefits, it'll add a lot of dust, gases and heat to its atmosphere which might be enough to melt the Martian ice caps. We could use the impacts to excavate extremely deep craters, by repeatedly impacting the same location, which would have a higher atmospheric pressure due to their depth. By using very icy asteroids and comets you would also be depositing a lot of water, nitrogen and other elements which would help with the atmospheric composition.
If you were able to defeat the crypto algorithms used by crypto currencies wouldn't that also mean you could defeat the cryptography used by banks, governments, online commerce, etc.? It would essentially be a doomsday scenario for all cryptography.
> Inside, wide corridors ("streets in the sky") run along the central long axis of every third floor of the building. Each apartment lies on two levels, such that the room on one side of a corridor belongs to the apartment that is mostly below the corridor floor, while that on the opposite side belongs to the apartment above. On those floors without corridors, the apartments stretch from one side of the building to the other, and each has a balcony on the western side.
If you search for floorplans of it, it looks like there are also interior corridors but I think every apartment has access to one of those wide corridors. I'm not sure what the point of having both interior and exterior corridors is, I would think it would be better to get rid of the interior corridor and give the extra space to the exterior one.
Edit: Well this is disappointing. After further research, it looks like that corridor is just the main one and the rest of the floor have dark, internal corridors and then enclosed balconies. What a missed opportunity, imagine a whole building full of corridors like the ones in the image, if you're going to build two story apartments then why not do it that way?
Agreed on the Cite Radieuse, the hallways are what I wish all apartment building halls looked like. Essentially interior streets, two stories high with apartment windows facing onto them, large windows to the exterior, benches or places for people to sit and enjoy the sunlight and meet their neighbors. The highrise as the modern incarnation of a village with all of the communal charm would be a delight. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/84/79/92/84799263a8dfa6fef6bf...
Completely impractical since every developer will choose the standard closed in, windowless and unadorned hallway because it is the cheaper option.
Everyone always goes straight to outsourced manual labor as a solution. It's a bad solution. If we weren't a nation run by corrupt middle managers trying to inflate their own salaries and sense of purpose we'd have stuck with the tried and true method of innovating on the manufacturing process itself making it more automated and less dependent on human labor. Human labor is always slow, prone to mistakes, and expensive. It's the favorite tool of the incompetent. If you think that's wrong then ask yourself which is better, harvesting a field with 100 workers with hand tools or with 1 farmer and a tractor?
Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, we would have been motivated to automate the manufacturing process and your iPhone would cost 100 dollars.
I think the first question is a very valid one. You say that newly created money will simply go to people who aren't at the wealth cap but my question is how exactly would that happen? I don't see a direct connection between the creation of new money and the supposedly underpaid people you think should be the recipients. You seem to think the only thing standing in the way is so called wealth hoarding, fine lets eliminate that with a wealth cap but then what? Give me a few extra steps here so it make sense.
Where would new money even go in a system with both fiat currency and wealth caps? Do you have to constantly increase the wealth caps with inflation? How do you perfectly manage that rate? As we can see governments are not capable of doing that now. Do you cap the profits of businesses as well and if so why do they continue to innovate or expand once they've reached the same level as all of their competitors? You're really just proposing a centrally planned economy where all wages and prices will be set by the government, that never works and never will work since no small group of people will ever be able to plan the lives of a much larger group without producing a lot of misery. Not to mention all the usual human failings and corruption that creep into every system over time.
Isn't it more important who gets the money and how the money is spent? Like if you create a trillion dollars but it goes to a single person who is incapable of spending it all so most of it winds up in high priced assets or investments vs. creating a trillion dollars and splitting it evenly among the entire population where it would wind up being spent on a wide variety of goods and services. In my mind, inflation is like bidding at an auction, the more people that participate and the more money they each have, the higher the prices will trend since they will attempt to outbid each other for the limited supply of goods. We saw this effect during the pandemic when spending shifted away from restaurants, entertainment and vacations to home improvements and home gyms for example. The prices at hardware and fitness stores went through the roof because there were suddenly more dollars and a big pool of people buying the same things.
If you make all skins and cosmetics available to everyone then you're back to square 1 and people will use some other heuristic to decide who they should pass to. I think this is actually an argument for paid cosmetics, it would improve gameplay for the people who spend the most time playing the game by allowing them to identify other people who also dedicate a lot of time and money to the game.
You're strawmanning, they don't ship Rocket League with all the graphics turned off and force you to pay for them. They sell silly hats and skins in addition to the already great graphics that they provide with the base model.
In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.
It's an exchange, the cryptocurrency itself is the bank. Banks don't require dollars or any fiat currency to exist, hell they invented paper money. The major difference is that banks had the advantage of gold and other precious metals as a pre-existing common medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies need a verifiable way to say that you transferred X value from chain A to chain B. I'm sure this is a solvable problem.
If Australia were to refine the uranium for export you wouldn't need anything special in the ways of shipping other than good containment and careful handling. If you replaced all power generation with nuclear that alone would drastically reduce the amount of shipping necessary for oil, gas and coal to a point where you would hardly need to be concerned about it. There's even a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1162/
Australia could be producing a lot more Uranium, it has an estimated 30% of world reserves and if you sort the list in the Wikipedia article about reserves by Reserves as of 2015, it's at the top. Canada also has large reserves and is 3rd in that list. There is also South Africa and Brazil along with other African and South American countries that could contribute to supply. I don't think supply of uranium ore would be a problem for the West.
As for safety, nuclear power production is probably one of the safest industries that exist since we are so acutely aware of the consequences. Waste storage is only a hot button issue because of trumped up fears. Compared to the variety of toxins we release into the air, the amount of nuclear waste produced is tiny and easy to contain. I'd rather all of the life threatening by products of power production be safely buried under a mountain hundreds of miles away from anyone than just dumped into the atmosphere all around the globe.
I think we just need a balance between decentralization and centralization. Think of banking as an example. If you want to be fully decentralized you can just use cash only and keep all of your money (or gold) in a safe at home. A fully centralized option is to have one national bank that everyone uses. Neither are great options but they both exist in practice. What's currently prevalent in a lot of places are a few big services that cooperate, same thing in tech right now too. What we want is a large number of small to medium sized services that are interoperable but also reliable. Make it easy for people to start their own service through laws or code and you've gone a long way towards solving the problem without putting extra work on the consumer.
I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice, and variety.
Isn't that a problem worth solving? It had to be solved for banks to work as reliable institutions. Having a single blockchain in the end is probably as bad as having a single bank, although for slightly different reasons.
I take issue with this, I don't see any discontinuous advances happening every year. I see incremental advances or the results of miniaturization and mass production making things small or cheap enough to reach mass market. Those are examples of progress but not of genius. Where are the revolutions? Why does it seem like physics has stalled, stuck on the same questions we've had for over half a century? We are making slow progress against universal scourges like cancer and Alzheimer's but there are no major breakthroughs that shake the foundations of biology and medicine. Psychology is still groping in the dark, unable to do much for the suffering millions endure. Where are the architectural advances beyond steel and concrete? The best we can do is 3D print odd looking homes. Why did it take almost 50 years to get ambitious space programs re-started? Even on the artistic front we are awash in a sea of nostalgia. I don't think genius is common at all and I agree with the article that we probably now produce them at a much lower rate.
> Leo (Norbert's Father) had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home.
The arts is also one area where one on one tutoring is still extremely common if not the defacto method of education. e.g. music lessons, "musical families", mentorship from fellow band members.
Having a tutor is superior to simply having access to all of the information in the world. The tutor acts as a guide to that information, they structure the presentation of that information to you based on your individual needs which means you can quickly speed through parts that you pick up easily while spending enough time and having a ready source of answers and guidance on problems that you have difficulty with allowing you to master them faster. Sure, someone could reach the same level of understanding with nothing but the internet and motivation but they will arrive there much, much later than someone who is actively tutored from a young age. Think of it as like acceleration to some maximum speed, the one that reaches that speed earlier will be able to go much further during the time allotted. You could see that allotted time as the lifespan of the person but age also affects performance and could result in a drop off in ability over time.
An intelligent person who is privately tutored can be performing at a college level or above when they are in their early teens. They can be at a doctoral level when they hit their twenties and then spend the entirety of their most productive years making use of their education. Compare that to our current educational track which has most people achieving their doctorate in their 30s. Performance for the average autodidact would likely be much worse.
Isn't the important thing whether or not tutoring produces a higher percentage of Darwins compared to our current model of schooling? If it does, then shouldn't we expend some effort on identifying students that are more likely to become a Darwin and then provide them with high quality, publicly funded tutoring? We all benefit from the discoveries of geniuses like Darwin so it is in our common interest to make sure that we produce figures of that stature as often as possible.
This argument is being framed incorrectly. It's the fundamental discovery that counts, not the implementations. The discovery of steam power is more important than Hero's Engine because discovering that you can do useful work with steam allows you to build all kinds of things that didn't exist before. Having a whirligig that runs on steam gives you nothing more than a few minutes enjoyment. Guns are definitely not a refinement of throwing things, someone who only knows how to throw something cannot build a gun. Guns are a refinement of the invention of gunpowder and good enough metallurgy to produce the gun itself. Similarly, rocketry is a refinement of gunpowder and the discovery that pressurized gasses escaping from a hole or nozzle can propel something. A smartphone itself is not a truly novel discovery, it's essentially a handheld portable computer. All the same technology exists or could exist in other form factors. If we compare it to something simple like a hammer, it is just a small hammer good for doing certain tasks and not others. It doesn't compare to the discovery that if you attach a weight to a handle you can hammer things. There are other specialized forms of hammer that are better for other tasks. i.e. a smartphone is just a specialized form of computer.