You'd need to bundle that law with a law that would make the tickets refundable until a certain point too close to the event.
It's legitimate, in my mind, to resell tickets for some event you wanted to go to but now cannot because life circumstances got in the way. It's less legitimate to scrape a website, buy a zillion tickets, and resell them at a huge markup.
Economic populism is more in vogue on both the left and right today than it was in the 90s.
Ban TicketMaster/Live Nation from the lucrative resale market and watch how quickly they conjure up an effective solution to solve the problem of bots snatching up all the tickets.
We purchased tickets for Alanis Morissette's tour this summer, within 60 seconds of sales opening, and magically all the first sale tickets were gone and we had to go to the resale market. From nosebleed to "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", literally, every single seat in a ~20k person arena sold within a minute? Who knew she was still that popular....
TM gets to collect their bullshit fees on every single sale, so what incentive do they have to do a damn thing about bots?
I live in rural America, and an EV charging infrastructure is largely non-existent. In concept, EVs have their merits, but in execution, they are not usable everywhere.
I live in rural America, and EVs are great here. Oh, public charging infrastructure mostly doesn't exist, but that's fine because I have electricity -- get this -- at my house!. I even have flush toilets, 'cause we're high class. The nearest Supercharger is ~100 miles away, but I have a garage, and a barn, and I put EV chargers in both. For normal daily driving, it works fine to just charge at home -- car is fully charged every morning -- and when I go on a long trip, well, the Supercharger network has me covered.
Works perfectly.
So you are willing to pay out another $10K eventually for a battery just so that you can plug in at home?
It's not clear that will ever be needed. EV batteries don't just stop working (barring some unusual fault); they just gradually decline in capacity, and the decline is very slow after the first 1-2 years. So expect to have 95% of capacity after two years, 80% after a decade, 60% after two decades, 50% after three, etc.
So it's just a question of when the capacity drops so low that the vehicle no longer has enough range -- but over time charging infrastructure is going to get better and better, so long range will become less and less important. Also, batteries are going to get cheaper.
So, yeah, it seems entirely reasonable to me to replace the battery in 20 years (if you haven't replaced the vehicle by then). Especially since the fuel savings over that time will far more than cover the replacement cost, even if the replacement cost hasn't come down, which it will!
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.
The exponential growth achievable by Von Neumann probes that don't mind traveling for millions of years to get to the next galaxy make space small.
An implication of a physically implemented "superintelligence" would be that it needs to have much more computing power than a human brain. There are scientifically sound indicators (not proof, just plausibility) that no such device can be built in this physical universe, hence a machine that is a "superintelligence" is not physically possible.
What are these scientifically-sound indicators?
I suppose some of that may be down to the difference in the value of the change. It was worth about 2.5X what it is today back when I was working convenience store night shifts, so people might have cared more about getting it correct.
Even more, people at Starbucks are paying $7 for a cup of coffee, so they're clearly not very price-sensitive. If the customer doesn't bother to look to see whether they got the correct change, should the cashier waste everyone's time getting it right? I think yes, but I could see where people might disagree.
I know people at the convenience store got pissed when they got shortchanged, which is why cashiers who couldn't count change out got fired pretty quickly. They might last longer at Starbucks today. Especially since most customers don't pay with cash.
Compare to Kira on DS9. She was a terrorist, and she hated Cardassians with every fibre of her being. She believed that the ends justified the means, and that collaborators were no better than the oppressors. Over the course of the series her outlook changed. She began to see political solutions as possible, and some Cardassians as real people, humanised as we would say. It wasn't just learning or developing the character she started with, the core of who she was evolved.
The very first episode of Star Trek I ever saw was Duet. Have you seen it? It was Season One and by the end of the episode we're pretty far removed from "Terrorist Kira." It did not take seven years for her to view the Cardassians as people or to think that a political solution was possible.
One girl works at Starbucks and said they've had to fire 3 workers in the last six months because they *literally* could not correctly count change.
That's not new. I saw the same problem when I was working at a convenience store in the late 80s.
Anyone who IS actually valuable with a rare skillset in high demand does not fear deportation. Before you can deport them, they already have another job, potentially in a hostile country,
The fact that they can get a job in another country easily doesn't mean they don't fear being required to leave this one. Most immigrants like the US and don't want to leave it, and even if they didn't care about the US in particular they've often built lives here that they don't want to uproot. I've seen several really smart, talented people get booted out of the country over bizarre rules or immigration snafus, even with help from expensive immigration attorneys. It's stupid.
And, of course, many more are willing to be abused by their employers in order to stay. I don't see that problem so much, because although I work with a lot of people on H1Bs, my employer (Google) treats them well, pays them the same as citizens, etc. But it make sense that there is a lot of abuse in the broader industry.
For people that are deemed so valuable that they need a special visa, they need to be given permanent residency and not beholden to a single employer, so if they are laid off, they don't need to fear deportation.
This is only part of the problem and does nothing to stop imported workers from memorizing as much IP as they can and returning home.
That doesn't happen much, not unless the worker is forced to go back because of crappy H1B policies. The fact is that nearly all foreign workers would love to stay permanently.
but if my memory serves me correct a whole load of services like transportation were monopolized by the state
There's nothing in any canon I can recall that would imply that. I do recall household fusion reactors and replicators (TNG's The Survivors) which is pretty much the opposite definition of central control by the State, unless we assume the replicator has DRM or some such, which was never said or implied. There's also civilian ownership of weaponry in every show, again, opposite of central control. There are privately owned ships, privately owned restaurants, privately owned French estates, the only thing missing is currency, but what good is currency in an abundance economy?
No one claimed that climate change will destroy the planet. Or wipe out Life on Earth.
Well, there is a non-zero probability that the Earth could enter a runaway warming cycle and become another Venus, with surface temperatures exceeding 400C. The planet wouldn't be destroyed, but life would probably be wiped out. AFAIK we haven't found any life form that can survive above about 120C.
That seems unlikely, though, given that Earth's hottest phases so far (after the crust cooled, anyway) have been considerably cooler than that.
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse
