I appreciate your comments as my original comment was not particularly good.

I suspect, at this point, that Hasan is already making a living running No Tech For Apartheid, and protesting for Palestine. It is even possible that it is a better living than they made working for Google, but probably not. I am not saying that sacrifices have not been made. However, when I say that this person is a professional protester I understood what that meant. My wife is a professional organizer. You can pay her, by the hour, to organize your closet, or your warehouse. Ibraheem is a professional protestor.

It is funny how you think that it is the red states that will kill this. Noncompetes are already not enforceable in many right-to-work states. It's the blue states where noncompete clauses had weight.

I actually believe that. Probably because that's what Hasan Ibraheem is quoted as saying in this article. He was already part of an organization No Tech For Apartheid. Here's the requisite quote from the article in case you don't feel like clicking on a link.

I don't see why this should be a surprising take. There are quite a few people that have become professional protestors. Nine people sat for a while in an office building with some very nice banners and somehow this has been in the national news for a week. These people came prepared, they were well-funded, and they clearly were plugged into the media well beforehand. He's done it once. I am sure that he has a long career ahead of him in this profession.

I want to make this very clear. I actually applaud this guy for his work. I am quite sure that he is genuine in his regard for Palestine, and it is hard to argue that it isn't an important topic. I just don't believe, even for a second, that any of this was a surprise to him. Hasan used his job at Google to catapult himself into this role.

Apple's only advantage is that they are seen as a status symbol by certain people. Apple has gone out of its way to make sure that you can tell if someone you are talking to is using an iPhone. If they aren't using an iPhone then the experience is degraded significantly. There are a million video chat programs, and they all work great, but the cool kids all want to Facetime. In group chats they care what colors bubbles they have.

That works great in places where there are a lot of Apple users, but it works against Apple in places where there is not. In China there are replacements for all of Apple's software that everyone uses, even if you have a fancy phone you aren't really in Apple's ecosystem. In essence you are buying an iPhone to become a second class citizen in all of the software you actually want to use. Everyone else is running Android.

Throw in major financial issues in China and all of a sudden Apple's phones look like a very poor choice, even without throwing politics in the mix.

I read an interview with one of the main protestors that got fired in the first wave. Their plan is to become a professional protestor. I suspect that pays better than being an average Googler.

Exactly. I drive a 1996 Honda Civic. If I were to buy a new car, that is the sort of car that I would be interested in. The sort of car that is inexpensive and capable of driving at freeway speeds. If the government would let me buy a Toyota Hilux for $12K I would do that tomorrow. Instead I get enormous pickups and SUVs that get through the loopholes in our current EPA standards and that cost more than my first house.

I just spent a week in Peru where Chinese cars are quite popular, and the taxi drivers that I talked to were pretty happy with theirs. The mentioned, time and again, that, for the price they were great cars. They were definitely popular. I would buy one of those. They tend to have manual transmissions, which I know how to drive, and which I trust not to leave me stranded.

If I could buy an electric vehicle for $10K I would do that. It wouldn't be my only vehicle, but it probably would be my primary vehicle. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but it doesn't make sense to replace my ridiculously inexpensive (paid for and hyper reliable) Civic with an expensive electric vehicle, or my far more useful Honda Odyssey mini-van. It sort of makes sense to replace the Civic with an electric vehicle, however, if the price is right.

Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

No. The timescales are on the side of my argument. The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years.

If just one alien civilization figured out how to travel at 1% the speed of light from Star to star, it would take about 10 million years to expand from one side of the galaxy to the other. That is a very small length of time, because if life is common enough for there to be, say, hundreds of civilizations developing in the galaxy, over its billions of years of history, then the spread of their beginnings would most likely vary by far more than just 10 million years.

If civilizations make machine superintelligences, then why do we not see machine superintelligences all over the place? They should have probes and satellites at a minimum, in every star system by now.

The weakness in that argument is that something has to happen to every single other civilization in our galaxy. It takes only one single success, to puncture the bubble.

My understanding is that the majority of the problem has to do with permitting and inspections. Are they planning to do anything to accelerate and ease permitting, inspections, and other such non-manufacturing related processes?

The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.

However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts are remotely accurate. This fiber optic cable is already forecast to cost 4 times as much as a cable that took the conventional route. It is also going to be considerably more expensive to maintain. The main selling point appears to be that it is less likely to sabotaged (unless your adversary has access to nuclear submarines, I guess), and it is also less likely to be cut by an errant anchor.

There's a reason that so many of the undersea cables follow essentially the same routes. That reason is cost. No one wants to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a cable that is going to have a serious price disadvantage.

Not to be a wet blanket, but no investment decisions have been made. If you read the article carefully you will realize that they aren't even to the survey stage yet. What they have done is that they have hit the EU up for 23 million euro in funding.

So far the estimated costs of the project are 1 billion euro, and that's projected to be considerably more costly than non-Arctic routes. So they have a lot of fund raising to do if they want to actually make this happen. And, let's face it, the easy money has already been raised. The EU is more than happy to pay 23 million euro, much of which will end up in Nokia's hands, to study this. Actual business people, spending their own money, are likely to be more skeptical. Especially considering the fact that comparable cable that doesn't take this route would only cost 250 million euros.

This article is really just a fancy advertisement for something that is probably not a good idea. The article actually does a good job of covering that part of the story. You have to read down a ways, but it is worth it. True to form the EU has already invested heavily in this project. I personally think that says more about EU spending than on the viability of the Northwest Passage for fiber optic cables.

If, on the other hand, you felt strongly enough about the direction that the climate was headed on this planet that you wanted to make a big bet on the Northwest Passage becoming a viable route for fiber optic cables, I suspect that their is an opportunity here to put your money where your mouth is. These people are going to need a lot more money than they currently have if this is to get off the drawing board.

I have noticed that every time the price of housing goes down, there is fear and panic in the news. We are wedded to the idea that the home is an investment and its price shall only go up, and that if the price does not go up, something is very wrong:

General Motors announced today that it is now selling this data directly to insurers. After all why should LexisNexis and Verisk get a cut?