So what you are saying is; you pay $2500 a month to ‘fuel’ your cars??

The filter is The Carrington Event. A little research into the study of stars finds out that the Carrington Event is not an unusual event, but rather a regular part of stelar mechanics. There is evidence that possibly dozens of similar level events have occurred from our own sun during the history of humanity, only technology was at such a primitive state that there was no effect on society until the most recent event. These solar outbursts are on a semi-regular schedule, and most stars produce them from what I understand.
So my Hypothesis is thus:
A civilization has to be able to make the run up from agrarian society all the way to advanced enough to having advanced technology that can survive a Carrington level event, within the window between 3 events. The solar event we call the Carrington event happened at a stage where it did not do serious permanent damage to our ability to advance. The one preceding it was not even noticed, which leaves us with the next one, which some say is late. Based on the degree we have plundered resources from the surface of the planet, if the next Carrington event is as destructive as the first to our modern infrastructure, it may be impossible to recover sufficiently to ever become a interstellar species; Provided we don’t develop to the point that all our tech is hardened against it.
This implies that any given civilization must have the magic mixture of intelligence, political co-operation, and drive to do so to become an interstellar civilization between stelar events. One little error, war, disease, famine, natural disasters, industrial revolution starting with poor timing between events, can stunt advancement long enough to cause the next stelar event to permanently cripple a civilization. Essentially, a civilization has to win the lottery against millions of factors to become detectable. If Fermi is right about how many times intelligent life should have arisen, then there are likely millions of planets with agrarian civilizations scratching out a living on top of the ruins of an advanced culture wiped out by a solar event, and perhaps a *few* who have expanded into their local stelar neighborhood.

I would think that making this post would paint a huge target on your company.

The cynical side of me thinks the idea to replacing all the thinking jobs with A.I. reeks of the upper class saying “Back to the fields, peasants!”
The never ending debate here on slashdot is, what the fuck do you do with the millions of middle class white collar workers who become redundant if this “A.I. Revolution” comes to pass, with one side arguing that it will result in a universal basic income utopia where everyone is well fed by inteligent farming machines, and the other side arguing it will lead to a stratified social construct with vastly wealthy upper class catered to by A.I. while the destitute poor slowly die off at the bottom strata, and little in between.
Honestly, I expect the reality will be far more disappointing, I’m just unsure how.

That is a good point.

Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find a way to make a synthetic nutrient out of hydrocarbons.

What family uses 83,000 gallons of water a year? A quick search has the average family using 12,000 gallons a year, nearly 7 times less than this article claims. Based on that data, they use more like 4,690 families worth of water.

I remember, heck, I was even going to try it myself, but realized the wall behind my desk was a plain cinderblock wall with white paint and a couple tangled power cords, so the results where going to be wildly underwhelming, so I gave up and wen’t back to playing video games.

From your linked search, just past all the sponsored results. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Why, I ask; does *anyone* want an INTERNET CONNECTED TOOTHBRUSH. This reminds me of the line I read several years ago,
“I needed to charge my phone, but my friend was using the only outlet to charge his book and cigarette. The future is stupid.”
I know this stupid ‘smart’ toothbrush will be sold on the merits of ‘track your brushing habits, ensure you brush long enough, automatically re-order brush heads, compete with your friends on social media for most hours spent brushing’ and other, pointless ‘features’. This is all stupid.

Agreed. Whenever I search for something and Quora cones up in the top of the search results, it means I need to re-format my search query, because there are no useful results for what I typed.

Selecting the northern states makes little sense to me. It is mid winter here, and I can say from direct experience, we get less than 6 hours of usable sunlight this time of year, and lots of snow. We use solar panels on a few remote water wells, and they are fine in the summer, but in winter it requires snowplows to go out to them and remove snow, regularly. And that is if the sun is out. Otherwise, a gas generator has to be used. If it was not so cost prohibitive to have these wells on the grid, we absolutely would. (Remote locations, far from existing power lines) Installing large scale solar farms in this environment, where half the year there us little sunlight, and even higher maintenance requirements to use what little sunlight we get, seems hilariously wasteful of solar panels.

Not only are they not unique, they change. Anyone who has used a fingerprint reader on a phone can tell you, over time, fingerprints change. I’ve gone back to old phones that used touchID, and been forced to use the passcode, because no amount of shifting grip, or re-aligning the finger on the sensor would register a match and unlock the phone. And I always register the same 4 fingers in my phone, so it’s not like I’m using the wrong hand/finger. Clearly, as we age, our fingerprints shift, enough to go outside whatever metric the software designers set as requirements for a ‘match’.

The reason you can buy those automotive parts is because cars and the like are made of industrial lego. Millions of standardized parts are used, and a fancy new body and trim put on the outside. There is no reason for an auto designer to re-invent the wheel bearing or blinker bulb for every model they build, they largely take off the shelf components and arrange them in a way that *looks* new.

Been saying it for ages, we’re slowly marching towards a Disney/Microsoft entertainment duopoly.