Maybe along with the "religious experts" we can get some "military intelligence", "business ethics", and "honest politicians" to help with such an important discovery.

You don't know that. The masks may have prevented other exposures before the one that got you. For all you know you might otherwise have been infected multiple times since you started masking.

In previous times, children took care of parents. Now you let a computer do some of that work. Assuming you could care for your father better than a computer that challenges people to electrocute themselves, your father gets a worse caretaker. You benefit by not having to take time out of your busy schedule to take care of a loved one or by saving money by not having to pay someone else.

If you say you have no choice because you have to earn a living, well that separation of people from their families and communities illustrates the problems like this situation.

Do you want your gravestone to say "loving child of a loving dad" or "provided the best computer for father while not personally around"?

> Far from our only hope, it's only just slightly helpful.

On the contrary, it's necessary, just not sufficient.

Your evidence that we got into this mess with half our population suggests that half our population is already overpopulated, at least for that rate of consumption. Plenty of research agrees.

> Granted, I'm sure the carbon calculations check out, but in a world with a population of 7.7 billion people, a dozen or so space trips a year add up to a trivial amount of carbon.

Congratulations. You just justified every single instance of pollution ever since none of them add up to that much alone.

You just described the internet when it began, as well as TV, radio, books, and many future technologies and media.

People might want to temper their optimism when they think some new technology will level the playing field. New technologies don't change people's or culture's values. They tend to become tools of the people using them, often augmenting their power and the slope of the playing field.

> "Matthew Heard, a software engineer from San Jose"

If he's in California, instead of going through the trouble of burning all those fossil fuels, he can cut out the middle man and just start a forest fire himself.

-40 Celsius is fine for the rest of the world but in America we need them to work at -40 Fahrenheit and just because they work at -40C doesn't mean they'll work at -40F.

With all this demand, the founding fathers could have gotten rich if they'd thought ahead and made a few NFTs of the Constitution.

This DAO is not the way. This parable from the Dao of Programming applies:

A Master Programmer passed a novice programmer one day.

The Master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game.

"Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the Master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the Master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

"Pray, Great Master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"

The Master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it with his heel. Suddenly the novice was enlightened.

Glad to see it finally over.

I wonder what will happen next.

While you advise "never get involved in a land war in Asia," I wouldn't dismiss it as inconceivable.

If the shareholders had more empathy for humanity the headline would say "Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans To Shut Down Facebook."

Metaverse? Are they deliberately trying to make themselves sound like cartoon villains?

They don't mind as long as their check clears first.

Yet the landfills are full. Maybe we shouldn't make everything disposable and substituting buying goods and services for things that don't need supply chains, like spending time with family, sports, cooking, gardening, and things people have done forever.