If there were social support, programmers could just refuse on ethical grounds to write the code that bricks a train or anything else.

Long ago when I was faced with something similar, I was just fired. If there was an organization that made such behavior public in a way that seriously hurt the reputation of a company, they might think twice about such abuse.

Would we have to start a new organization for programmers or is there an existing one that could take on this function? The EFF comes to mind, but open to other suggestions. I will ask the EFF if they would consider this.

It might be a good idea to understand where greed comes from.

For a few hundred years humans were selected for wealth and that selection was open-ended No matter how much wealth you had, it didn't hurt the chances of your genes getting into the next generation.

If you want to know more about this, find a copy of Gregory Clark's Genetically Capitalist paper.

I don't think you have any options. All cars are connected to the manufacturer nowadays.

One of the websites I have used for years (iHerb) added ads that pop across the startup screen. They slow down getting into ordering and are annoying.

I wonder if there is a way to shut them off in the browser (Firefox).

"as far as human extinction"

Back in 2006, I wrote a story (The Clinic Seed) where an AI helped the human race go biologically extinct (the last line is that the local leopard inherited the village).

But nobody died, they all were reversibly uploaded into a simulation of the village and could revert to the real world any time they wanted. They didn't because the simulated world was a more pleasant place.

Boiled frog kind of story.

"gasoline more expensive."

I thought up something that could get your gas down to a dollar a gallon,
maybe less. Uses coal and a little electricity from solar.

Any big renewable project has to make some liquid hydrocarbon fuels,
they are just too useful. So I have watched synthetic fuel production
for a long time. Recently it dawned on me that intermittent renewable
energy might be useful.

H2O + C H2 + CO (H = +131 kJ/mol)

The water gas shift reaction would let you run up the hydrogen at the
expense of the CO. This would halve the carbon without substantially
changing the energy content of the gas, (Making diesel or gasoline
takes twice as much hydrogen as CO.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The first reaction is endothermic, so heat must be continually added to
maintain the reaction. (Wikipedia)

Carbon is 12 gm/mol. 83 mol/kg and a kg would soak up 10900 kJ. A
metric ton of carbon evaporated in steam would need 10900000 kJ or
3.03 MW hours.

This would produce 1/6th of a ton of hydrogen with a combustion energy
content of 50 MWh=/ton, about 8.3 MWh. CO combustion is 10.1 MJ/kg. We
have 2800 kg or about 7.85 MWh. So we make about 16 MWh of gas from a
ton of coal and 3 MWh of renewable electric power. Most of the energy
in the gas is from the coal.

It’s an interesting way to use intermittent power though. From this
point, the gas can be stored for winter, burned in combustion turbines
or made into gasoline or diesel.

To solve the CO2 buildup we would still need to do air capture, but
that has to be done anyway.

From a data point on coal cost.

The cost of 16 MWh of gas is $20/ton of coal, 3 MWh of solar power
plus the capital cost of the plant. Since there is no storage
involved, I am going to assume a cost of 2 cents per kWh or $20/MWh
(that may be optimistic, but the cost of PV is close to 1 cent per kWh
in the Mideast). Thus a ton of vaporized coal would cost $80. Following
a ton of coal through the process, half of it would come out as CO2 increasing
the hydrogen. Half a ton of carbon and 1/6th of that in hydrogen would show
up in the product. At 7.3 bb/s per ton, 583 kg gives 4.25 bbl. The raw materials
and energy cost would $18.80/bbl or about 44 cents per gallon.

That leaves a lot of room for the capital cost of submerged arc gasifiers.

It's a method to bootstrap intermittent solar and coal into diesel fuel or gasoline.

From the number of engineers in China, I suspect that IP theft is going the other way.

It's not big numbers, it's small numbers. 16 MW is 4 locomotive engines.

The Charles Stross novel, _Halting State_ has a sequence where a driverless car kidnaps people and tries to kill them.

There is no lack of energy, just affordable energy. One of the facts that I ran into recently was that the capital cost of making hydrogen using platinum cells was higher than the energy cost if you are using intermittent solar.

If we want to make inexpensive hydrogen, we need to find a less capital-intensive way or perhaps mine asteroids for the platinum. One way might be a submerged arc in coal. Making hydrogen that way takes relatively little energy The CO2 produced along with the hydrogen can be sorted out and sequestered.

Needs analysis.

More than 40 years ago I was in summertime Tucson Az.

A woman was hit by a car and WAS burning on the hot street. I stopped and my wife and I got a blanket under her.

Keep this in mind, should be added to first aid training.

Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the engineering community about what direction we should go.

I have worked on power satellites quite a bit. They *might* be an energy solution, but the traffic to space is extreme, around 25,000 one hundred-ton loads a year, and that takes 20 years to replace 1/3rd of the energy we use.

Also looked into "dyson dots" a sunshade at L1. The amount of material needed for that project is so large that mining a metal asteroid is the only practical approach.

There are no easy solutions that I know about.

I am surprised they bothered. The CCP has come down on business in this area so hard that it is ending growth in China.

I saw the scooter business rise and fall over a few months in San Diego.

I think what they need is an entirely different scooter design, one smart enough to go home by itself, recharge and go someplace where it is needed.

Interesting engineering challenge.

In regard to explosions, the FAA is running a test of LOX/LNG at Dugway proving ground.

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa....

Mixed LNG/LOX is a sensitive, high-energy explosive, about twice the energy of TNT, so the maximum for the big booster if the bulkhead failed would be about 4500 tons time two or around 9 kT of TNT.

There is a solution that will keep mixing from happening. It takes an open container of tryethylaluminum in the top of the LNG tank (which has to be under the LOX tank). If the bulkhead failed, there would be an awful fire, but no mixing and no multi-kT bang. (Patent in the works.)