I hate the whole "this will create jobs" attitude. The more productive something is, the fewer jobs it creates. I mean, honestly, rather than having four million people schlep to and from work to keep the lights on, it would be better to have some magical, maintenance-free "free energy" machine that would do it without anyone having to lift a finger. Society as a whole would be much richer.

But there's the contradiction: we'd be richer, but unemployment would go up, so some of us would be more miserable.

At some point, automation and technology are going to make us so productive that most of us won't be necessary to keep the economy running. At that point, if we're still in the "you have to earn your keep" mindset, we'll end up with a permanently oppressed, permanently unemployed underclass. Cars start driving themselves, putting a million cabbies, a million truckers, and a bunch of bus drivers out of work. Thanks to improved handwriting recognition, the Post Office has been shutting down Remote Encoding Centers left and right. The next wave of automated checkout stations could eliminate millions of grocery checkout and fast food jobs. Online shopping is killing retail jobs as we speak. Had we not boxed up our entire manufacturing infrastructure and sent it to China, we would have lost most of those jobs to robots anyways.

And now the robots are kicking our asses at Jeopardy. Does anyone here really feel that their particular skillset cannot be obsoleted in the next fifteen or twenty years? That you'll continue to be able to use your mind and hands to extract a living wage from those who own every damned thing?

Society becomes richer, while most of its people become poorer. It can't continue. Time to dust off Karl Marx.

>> And the subsidies will get killed off. Because we are broke.

That's a total right wing lie. Our government is 'broke' because we're not charging the taxes necessary to pay for the services we provide. And with the interest rate on Treasury bonds hovering at 3%, it seems like now would be an ideal time to go into more debt to build the infrastructure that we'll be needing soon.

>> Green energy is energy without consequences and that just doesn't exist.

Strawman. Wise technological progress has always consisted of replacing one set of problems with a hopefully smaller set.

>> suddenly realize that making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces

Another right-wing lie. The actual energy payback time for a modern solar panel is 6-18 months. And it's going down. Nor is any "industrial process" static. If they have a mind to, they can redesign the processes to use less energy, fewer and less toxic chemicals, etc. The Rocky Mountain Institute has a long and rich history of assisting in such redesigns.

>> that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology

The solution being to site on already degraded land and to build carefully. Or to put panels right on top of the buildings they provide power to. As solar power becomes cheaper (and it will, since the cost has been steadily cutting in half every six years for decades) it will make less sense to find the absolute sunniest possible place to put them.

>> Wind is just as bad. Sounds wonderful until you imagine a few hundred square miles of endless windmills making mincemeat out of the bird population

Bird kills are a concern, but they're greatly exaggerated. The Audubon Society is fully behind wind power. That should tell you something.

And the amount of land required may be overstated. A recent breakthrough showed the way forward for increasing the energy collected per acre tenfold. The basic technique is using small, vertical turbines sited closely together, spinning in opposite directions to create constructive interference.

If the efficiency breakthrough holds up, and is widely adopted, wind power providers will have greater leeway in where they put the installations. They won't have to reach as high into the sky.

But the broader point is that none of these problems are insoluble.

>> and the huge transmission lines to bring the power from the uninhabited barren wastelands that tend to have reliable wind to the coastal hives where people live.

We need a stronger national grid in any case. But as I said, if we can learn to harvest wind power more efficiently, siting will become less of an issue, and generation will migrate toward the areas that actually need the energy.

For any reasonable definition of "practical and efficient", you're entirely wrong. The solar panels of 1950 (hell, even up to 1990) were incredibly expensive, and impractical for any but the most extreme use cases.

But since their invention, photovoltaic solar has been churning along, cutting its cost per watt in half approximately every six years. The trend is accelerating now, because we're finally achieving some economies of scale. That's why the CEO of GE recently stated that he expected new solar to be cheaper than new coal within five years.

You asked for it.

>> One can argue he got into Yale as a legacy because of Bush Sr., however that doesn't explain also getting a degree from Harvard and having grades on par with "super smart" Al Gore or Kerry.

Harvard is kinda tough to get into, really difficult to pay for, but otherwise not that difficult to graduate from. Especially if you're getting an MBA rather than a real degree.

Constitutional Law without the backing of Daddy's political connections is a higher bar to clear.

>> Btw, when are we going to actually see the grades of the 'smartest man to ever sit in the Oval Office?'

Write to the College of William and Mary. I'm sure they'll send you Thomas Jefferson's transcripts for the price of postage.

Oh, wait. You were referring to Obama, as if the claim of :::googles a bit::: some random history professor on the Don Imus Show has to be defended by everyone left of Joe Lieberman.

>> Time to face up to reality, W isn't stupid and making fun of a minor speech impediment on anyone else would get you sent to the reeducation camp because making jokes about the disabled is a major no-no these days.

W wasn't just a brilliant mind hamstrung by a speech impediment. He was narrow, dogmatic, intellectually disengaged, and had absolutely no interest in ideas that were not already his own. Worse, he surrounded himself with people who were incompetent and vicious, but loyal to him. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're too busy clearing brush to read memos entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S."

Whatever intellectual firepower Bush had was expended in the pursuit of passing tax cuts that we couldn't afford and selling a war we never should have entered into. He clearly didn't give much thought to whether they were good ideas.

Sunk costs is important here. We've already spent several billion dollars on the telescope. Now we have the choice to either spend a couple billion more and have the most advanced telescope in the known universe, or save that couple billion and have a bunch of useless parts in a warehouse somewhere. The money that's already been spent, has already been spent.

So you, as an employer, are afraid of not having your employee's thumbs in a vise. Would you feel the same way if a candidate, during an interview, somehow let it slip that she had $2M in the bank and didn't actually need your salary? After all, she also has the power to slack off, or walk out without notice. Would you be interested in her criminal background moreso than other candidates?

What if a candidate said that his wife is a doctor, and makes twice what he did at his last job? Again, it's a sign that you can't just dangle a paycheck above him and expect him to sit up and beg. You'll have to trust that he has other motivations, like pride in his skills and a desire to tackle problems.

The truth is, the salary you offer only provides so much incentive to your employees. You can pay someone twice the going rate and they could still walk off the job one day and never come back. But because you're a libertarian who wants to deny the obvious consequences of his own philosophy, you have to pretend that employers have strong incentives to be generous in doling out salaries and benefits to their employees.

But you give the game away by saying that you fear not having full control over your employees. It's never in an employer's interest to have an employee who has financial independence from their employment. Employers want their employees broke and desperate and willing to do anything they ask.

My point about tai chi isn't that it's good or bad. It's more about your respective approaches to life-extension. You like tai chi. I have no problem with that. You think it will make you live longer. I have a little bit of a problem with that, but nothing that couldn't be overcome by a well-designed study that dealt specifically with life extension and separated the benefits of tai chi from the benefits of other forms of exercise.

I do have a problem with the idea that you, while only being dimly aware of the details of Kurzweil's regimen or what studies inform it, are happy to declare tai chi superior. The sorts of evidence you cite are marginally relevant (the NIH) study, completely fallacious (tai chi is old and popular) or inaccessible (untranslated Chinese studies).

Not a big problem, mind you. People believe false -- or merely not-yet-proven -- things all the time. But bring evidence before dismissing what seems like a scientific approach to the problem.

Re: lifespans. Wikipedia has some stats on the fringes of extreme old age. It looks like, since 1950, the age of the "oldest person living" has snuck up from 109 to 114, which is an increase of one year every ten years. So it's moving, but slowly enough that I'll grant the point. I also suspect that it's more due to overall population increase than medical advances. A bigger population means more people angling for a shot at the record.

But as to "keeping young people alive," no. Unless by "young people" you mean people in their fifties and sixties. Kurzweil could be kept alive for another thirty or forty years relying only on the "helping more people reach the maximum possible lifespan" model alone, even if his claims for his regimen are mostly false. But beyond that, there does need to be some fundamental advances in stalling or reversing the aging process. You're right that we've shown little capacity for such breakthroughs so far.

"Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein

The question rubs me the wrong way. I understand the desire to stay focused. But you want to be well-rounded. You should want to be able to write well, to have a broad grasp of the way the universe works and how you fit into it. You should want to make your body stronger and more graceful than it is today. You should want to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument.

And this might be your last chance to do any of that in a supportive setting like college. Once you get into the rat race, it's hard to jump back out and go exploring. Really hard.

We have a saying in the software engineering world: Avoid premature optimization. You don't go crazy optimizing your program before you really understand what you want it to be. You don't optimize before you know what sections of the program will be the real bottlenecks. You don't optimize at the expense of the flexibility and readability of the code. What you're demanding to do to yourself right now strikes me as a form of premature optimization.

Here are his achievements, which seem pretty substantial. Not 'greatest genius to ever genius' level, but he's got a solid track record.

What has he leveraged these achievements into? Some book sales. A small but devoted following of nerds. A not-entirely deserved reputation as a crackpot.

Frankly, I'd love it if Kurzweil got a following among the people who decide things. An immortality equivalent of the Manhattan Project would be friggin' awesome.

1) Alkalized water notwithstanding, Kurzweil seems to have a method to his longevity regime madness. Please link to the studies that show the longevity benefits of tai chi.

2) Dude, he's 62. He could easily live another 20 years. 30, if his regime is beneficial. If we see as much advancement in medicine between now and 2031 as we deed between 1981 and today, I think you could tack another 10 years onto that. But according to Kurzweil, we're going to see a lot more.

3) If Kurzweil dies, that says little about the timeframe for technological immortality. Okay, it establishes a floor level. But rooting for him to fail proves what, exactly?

Full disclosure: I'm certain that immortality is possible, though uncertain about the timeline. I find Kurzweil's reasoning somewhat persuasive, but it's very difficult to tell if his law of accelerating returns is justified.

Good looking? Perhaps.

Intelligent? Anything but.

Demonstrated ability to run a government? She ran:

* A state with the population of a mid-sized urban area,
* Where the residents pay no taxes and in fact are paid by the state to live there,
* For less than two years.

Cake, meet walk.

I don't read the situation the same way. It sounds like they had an ambitious, high tech program that they thought would reap huge benefits down the line. Then they lost a chunk of their funding (a common thing in British government lately), and had to scale back the plan and only go after the lowest-hanging fruit.

Reading the story, it seems that the problem was that they *did* fire the idiots. Or at least, the British people did what they were supposed to do when they're dissatisfied with things.

G-Cloud was a Labour initiative. When the Conservatives got hold of the government, and decided to implement their (disastrous) austerity program, they started cutting budgets left and right. Which is a shame, because they're cutting off funding for a program that might have brought huge efficiencies down the line.

My recollection is that lighter, faster ones hold more energy. The energy stored goes up proportional to the weight of the flywheel, but proportional to the square of the velocity.