Ah, someone beat me to it. I was going to suggest one of the ancient universities with 800+ year traditions, on the grounds that even once the money dried up they might continue to host the website out of sheer force of habit.
1,655 karma · joined January 16, 2011
Like a doctor or barrister, more tied to your profession than to one job. You need to be effective in your role, build your reputation by demonstrating your skills are beyond the bare minimum, and continually develop yourself as you go along. Ideally you get lots of win-wins: your 'extra' is a win for the company in the long run, and you come out of it a little wiser, and over time you're more effective due to the effects of past 'extra'. The benefits of these win-wins can be pretty intangible, but they do build up over time.
I don't feel on especially solid ground saying that - although I've experienced dead (micro) SD cards myself. It's a controversial topic, and no doubt some people are confused by what's just filesystem corruption. There are flamewars.
Presumably some perceived traits have positive effects - driving one's own behaviour with "I'm not a quitter" or whatever. But I find it fascinating that traits might not always be strongly correlated with what people actually do.
As a person living in a (relatively for the western world) low-cost-of-living area, making a decent income for a low-cost-of-living area, it sometimes feels like a local maximum. It would take a sizeable income jump to offset low cost of housing. No doubt the top world cities are the place to be, in terms of all kinds of fun and opportunities, but lifestyle would be worse there unless or until you'd broken into a really high income bracket.
The Sagrada Familia is a marvel, and deserves to be finished, but it was somehow magical to be there while it was (long-windedly) being built, worked on by skilled artisans probably not too different from someone working on the cathedral in my own home town in the 1090s.
Close my work laptop, take it to the office, open it up - it's hot to the touch, stuck on the Dell high temperature warning screen, and needs to cool down and reboot.
Of course it would be crazy for me to keep repeating this scenario (I tried changing the hibernation settings, and now just shut it down) - but we can wish for it to be better, especially since it's obviously possible.
It wouldn't be as effective as universal pacifism, just like the police can't prevent all murders - but they can deter them. It could be a future that still has nation states rather than a world government, without any superpowers.
I suspect that the mix of crops could change in the medium term, to less labour-intensive and more automation-friendly ones. Expect lurid headlines and more expensive strawberry jam.
It will be interesting to see whether the government caves to ag-industry pressure and puts in place special summer visa schemes or similar. On the one hand, the current government is fairly right-wing. On the other; they are quite interventionist, aligned with business interests, and dependent on rural votes. And most of all, media-led. I'd guess they'll respond to headlines about fruit rotting on trees with some madcap scheme.
It would just be nice if the big sites were less terrible. If Facebook were once again a nice place to stay in touch with 'real life' people instead of an engagement-driven nightmare. If LinkedIn could be a wider-professional-interests place with HN-quality discussion instead of just recruiters and drivel. If Twitter remained an amazing place to connect with thinkers but not the place for outraging people into campaigning for someone to lose their job. Because of network effects, the big sites eat up a lot of what should be better discussion.
I would love to be part of small social media groups with bonds of friendship and tolerance. Trends, food, non-extreme politics, in proportion to their magnitude in everyone's lives, varying with people's interests but not magnified by one-issue echo chambers. Not 100% sure what you mean by normies but I suspect I'm in favour of them.
Group chats with close friends and family fulfil this need fairly well, and are quite relaxing compared to wider social networking. But they're likely only to cover a small subset of every person's interests. Something like the infamous 'Circles' might actually be useful on a larger scale.
But that doesn't make it necessarily the most useful model for a complex animal to modify its own behaviour. We are dynamic systems that can voluntarily and involuntarily vary the amount of energy we expend. Our bodies send appetite signals to our consciousness, which can be pretty hard to ignore.
The only times I've consistently lost weight has been via a calorie deficit. But it's totally understandable that people want another model, either something like keto which purportedly produces weight loss without a calorie deficit by messing with the body's fat-storage mechanics in some way, or some behaviour+diet which produces a calorie deficit but with minimum lethargy and hunger. There's a lot of nonsense around dieting but the basic desire is understandable.
Of course, there are many nuances. Your musculature (though surely if you were a bodybuilder you'd have said so). Your sex, both for where fat sits on your body and for social expectations. The clothes you wear. Normal human variation - if your femurs just happen to be -2 standard deviations in length, your BMI will always be higher than it would be otherwise.
Someone with a BMI just into the thirties can still have a good level of walking-around fitness, look good in a shirt, etc. They wouldn't stand out in today's society. But the medical risks are still increased in a statistical sense. It being normalised may make people feel better but doesn't solve the medical issue.
Tungsten has an enormously high melting point, the normal way tungsten parts are produced, for typical industrial purposes such as radiation shielding, is sintering (powder + heat + pressure) to near-net-shape, finished with a machining pass.
Even once robots can do amazing things, there needs to be an economic use case that's compatible with what they can do, how they're powered, and how long they can work for.
Similar to quadcopters in a way - they have changed the world in some limited ways, but so far they haven't scaled up to carry people or out to deliver parcels, so they remain niche. If someone figures out one day that robots can deliver burritos/assassinate dissidents/stack shelves efficiently, it could be a quick takeoff.
- Nominally 0% interest (albeit we paid sticker price of the vehicle with no discount).
- Deposit + payments such that the car was never 'under water'. In fact, subject to some heavy caveatting about its condition, I think we could have handed the car back and walked away from the agreement at any time, something almost unheard-of in American-style car loans.
- At the end of the PCP period, there was still a big balloon payment, which is how they get you rolling onto a new car+contract of course. But it was a known quantity that was possible to save up for, and due to the monthly payments, as mentioned above, being of sufficient size, the balloon payment was much less than the cost to buy the same car in same age/condition/etc on the open market, so it made sense to pay the money and keep the car.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about the above. One is that I perceived some benefits from the monthly payments being larger rather than smaller - when considering time value of money etc this is presumably irrational. But people do seem to genuinely suffer from upside-down car loans, where they could 'afford' the payments but find themselves trapped making them on an un-sellable vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is the payments were set at a level where I could actually afford the car. The other interesting thing is how easily the formula could be tweaked to make more expensive cars look affordable, and to incentivise rolling onto another contract. The flip side is that such tweaks let the purchaser have a lower payment, or a nicer car for the same payment, but might not be in the purchaser's rational best interest.
Refrigeration makes sense as the underlying driver - freshness and locality became less important. Then the supermarkets didn't have the cost of the distribution network, and exercised more centralised buying power on the suppliers.
Thankfully, we're based on replicators - we could colonize the galaxy by sending out only small numbers. But barring some very far-future tech, each fertile world is going to carry a large immobile population, and we're going to have to learn not to trash planets.
It's a way to stick to what you're interested in, and makes it fairly easy to 'keep score' if your goals are measured in $€¥£. I get the impression too that being close to flows of money often gives good opportunities to make a cut.
You could do whatever science a few minutes of weightlessness provides; astronaut training too
It is worth noting that Virgin also operate a separate commercial smallsat launcher company, Virgin Orbital, which uses air-launched rockets, so maybe Virgin Galactic experience helped with that.
The side most obvious to outsiders is where it seems to work badly - the bad sheriff who keeps being re-elected, quirks like dry counties. But it's admirable in a way, that people have some power to determine the local rules, together with the freedom to move away if they don't like it. If local democracy were extended further, there would be more variation, and more weirdness, but perhaps it would be a good thing overall.
I would like to imagine that in this day and age that isn't the case, but the name works against it.
I believe that discounting finding meaning from work is too cynical. But it only exists for some people in some jobs, some of the time. I think the visceral reaction to Bezos' comments is because we know it definitely can't exist in so many Amazon jobs.