costs are driven by scarcity. At least for the things like energy, food, and shelter I mentioned. Nobody is hording corn or fertilizer. Its expensive because the supplies are down.

Nobody is charging more for electricity because they pushing it all into some secret battery some place (or pumped reservoir for that matter), nor are they idling their generation facilities. They are charging more because more people want to use more of it then can be produced and delivered reliably. Now i do believe we could have much cheaper energy. That supposes winding the clock way back and making policy choices that would have favored the production gas, and oil fired generating plants, more domestic pipelines, and more domestic oil refining facility.

As it is now US crude is artificially cheap because we can't move it where it is needed, and Obama energy and environmental policy that have prevented building the power plants to burn it. It sad really the public suffers with inflationary pressure and cost of living problems while had we let the market work, those $100 a barrel prices in the mid 2000s would have resulted in 'drill baby drill' and building out generating capacity - instead we got the Paris accords...

The subject of your post is Kessler Syndrome, but Kessler Syndrome is definitely not a concern with these LEO constellations. Anything not regularly reboosted at these altitudes quickly deorbits because they're flying within the outer edges of the atmosphere. Kessler Syndrome is a potential problem at higher orbits where stuff in orbit tends to stay in orbit for a very long time, making accumulation problematic.

As for being hit by falling space junk, It's super rare for stuff that has reached orbit to hit the ground. That tends to be a concern with stuff that doesn't quite make it to orbit, which is one of many reasons why launch reliability is important.

Besides Kessler? These satellites cannot cause Kessler Syndrome precisely because they deorbit. There may be ill effects of burning a few hundred tons of material in the upper atmosphere every year, we'll have to see, but Kessler Syndrome is definitely not an issue.

Can we just stop with this post scarcity nonsense.

We are not in some post scarcity utopia. We are rapidly running out of real-estate. Yes we can build up but many was not meant to live in endless concrete jungle, most people don't really want to, but the consequence of unbound population growth (which does seem to be slowing, for reasons of scarcity) would be ecological collapse as we take to much away from the remaining natural spaces.

The cost of energy is also going up. Wind and Solar don't actually lower costs, if they did they the oil majors would be building them at the same time they develop fields. you can't make money on window and solar without major tax subsides and fake "green" programs, where because you are in a "green industry" you get side step the impact studies and mitigation requirements any other commercial activity would be required to support/execute/subjected to, whales and birds be damned. - Energy will either continue to increase in cost until someone can make money in wind or we will develop new Fossil resources, but those will also be more costly as the recovery complexity only goes up as we deplete them.

The costs of food continues to rise, yes yes distribution not production problem, blah blah blah.. Might be/likely is true about being able to feed everyone for quite sometime by reducing waste vs output growth, but right now there is no *viable* plan to reduce waste on that scale, and the costs of production are rising, inputs like chemical fertilizer are not getting cheaper and they wont.

As bizarre as it seems we are circling back around the scarcity being about basic needs like food and shelter, because advanced manufacturing has made what ancient man saw as luxury very abundant. In most of the USA $15 will put a very powerful computer and communications platform in the palm of your hand, but it will barely feed you a week at the grocery store - (think homemade pancakes from scratch for two meals, and canned veg/beans for dinners). We have luxury poverty, where people can get some very nice things, but yet can't afford the most basic things they need. Why because there is real scarcity under those basic things.

The answer to most of this, is actually reset the international systems. Every nation/region needs to find away to sustainability produce enough food for their own population. Nations that are net importers of food or have net emigration should be subjected to heavy trade, travel, and monetary, sanctions by other nations. That will force them to fix their economic balance and focus on the right kinds of production. It will also re-balance more developed nations. There are lot of people that just are not fit to work in high-tech, and there are not enough jobs in 'trades' and ditch digging to provide a long term outlet. We actually need economics that allow workers to earn a living wage for 'low-complexity' activities like seamstress, and basic furniture jointing etc; put another way we need enough protectionism to that the domestic appetite for basic household items is satisfied primarily from domestic sources. - Capitalism at the domestic scale will work well for organizing that, after all it did in the past. Capitalism applied at the globalscale, with nationalistic actors looking to game the system will continue to fail.

Wow -

So because someone happens to be winning life's lottery for the moment, they deserve to be killed...

This is the folks is the prevailing thinking on the left. You don't have to do anything, have done any specific harm to anyone. if you have more than they do and are doing anything other then using it to mobilize against anyone else who also happens to have more than them you are target!

If you disagree with them on what is good for people or what love or agÃpi mean, you also automatically deserve death!

This is who they are! It is what drives them. When you see the opinions of Drinkypoo, AmiMojo, or rsilvergun, on here, this is their underlying thesis for everything they say. Just be aware, while no human is garbage these people are actively seeking to be so, always!

Peak stupidity is allowing, let alone supporting private companies to have control over your health care.

Still....better than having the Federal bureaucracy in charge of it....

Ugh....can you imagine health centers ala DMV?

*shudder*

This is a common strain of misunderstanding I see all over the place. People think that evolution is somehow magical and that what it produces is mystically better because it's "natural". That's all garbage.

Evolution is a random process. There's no intelligence guiding it, nothing that ensures that the "choices" it makes are the best alternatives or can't have horrific consequences. In fact, the vast majority of evolutionary changes are utter failures that immediately get selected out.

Also, it's silly to claim that climate change is moving "too fast for evolution". Evolution absolutely can and will respond to climate change... it might be that corals go extinct and something else evolves to fill their niche in ocean ecology, or it might be that corals do evolve in something like their current form. Evolution is fine either way and will produce something that settles into a new equilibrium. It might not be an equilibrium humans like, and it might not settle fast enough to make us happy, but we need to realize that what we're concerned about isn't the ecosystem -- that will survive regardless, unless we get into some runaway feedback loop that turns Earth into Venus, or Neptune -- what we're concerned about is maintaining an environment that we're accustomed to.

Given all of that, our potential creation of genetically-modified corals isn't somehow subverting evolution, it's just another evolutionary avenue. Rather than random mutations, we'll create some specific ones and then we'll throw them into the mix and see if they get selected for or against. The same mutations we create deliberately could also have occurred randomly and would that make the outcome any less "natural"?

And if we've already altered the environment so much that our preferred ecosystem is going away anyway, what's the harm in trying to use CRISPR CAS-9 to "guide" evolution in a direction we'd prefer, rather than letting it randomly go in whatever direction it will? Could our genetic modifications make things worse? Sure! Could random mutations also make things worse? Sure! Which is more likely to maintain an ecosystem of the sort we enjoy? No one can say for sure, but in general if you want to get from point A to point B you're better off aiming for B rather than just walking randomly.

Even better would be to stop changing the climate, but at this point all we can do is try to limit the amount we're changing it. And we should do that! But the best that we can do might still not be enough for corals as we know them, so if we like reefs and reef ecosystems (and we really do; I'm an avid SCUBA diver and I love reef ecosystems), then we should probably put some effort into researching modifications that can survive warmer and more acidic oceans.

Both are true, I think. Without discussion and care the numbers would probably be an order of magnitude larger, maybe two... but that's still very small.

Most people are not "deeply stupid". But that post was deeply arrogant.

Don't forget....booze on an airplane also seems to be exceptionally good too!!!

Something about some beer or a good mixed drink just seems to make the works GREAT at 30K feet....

No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.

Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.

That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet subscription. That jumps to almost 50% by 2000 so the uptake was pretty fast but a lot of us older Slashdot posters probably grew up in a bit of tech bubble, at ~1/5 of the population being 'online' it would be easy for an adolescent or young adult to not really be aware others were not sharing their experience.

I think 'the information super highway' lives a little more dominantly in the media of the period (1992-1995) then it actually did in most of the populations lives because it was such a huge area of commercial growth and the people who were using it outside 'the office' were the affluent, which always have driven our later 20th century American cultural conversation.

Recall how big a deal 'Cyber Monday' was, that was because people would shop online at the office, because they did not have access to do so at home! Long rant but i think for most people the Internet became a day to day feature of their lives more in the 1997-2000 span then in the 1994-97 span.

At least we can stop reading endless articles by people who think they are a hell of a lot more insightful than they actually are about how "1984 is not a howto guide" and move on to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - wasn't supposed to represent aspirational social, environmental, and technological targets.

The good news is it should keep both the read to much environmental fiction and read to much AI fictions occupied for sometime and have them fighting over literary terf.

It will be a nice change of pace around here.

And if they find that it's not helpful to them right now, there's no point in learning something about it for the future -- because it's going to change. If it ever achieves its full promise there will be no need to learn how to use it, because it will learn how to work with us.

Well, assuming it doesn't kill us all.

I notice that you didn't provide any counterexamples which is, of course, because there aren't any. No planned economy larger than a few hundred people has ever succeeded. While capitalist economies do go through cycles of expansion and recession (which a well-functioning central bank and adequate regulatory oversight can ameliorate but not eliminate), capitalism consistently makes the entire society wealthier, top to bottom. Yes, it does tend to produce inequality, and that has some negative social effects, but over time even the poorest end up better off than under any other system, assuming modest government regulation to prevent abuses.

There really isn't; definitely not compared to central planning. The results speak for themselves, but it's useful to understand why, I think. When people look at the way capitalist economies tend to produce 10 factories making similar shoes while it seems obvious that one big factory would be more efficient, the mistake they're making is in looking only at what they can see with their eyes: Buildings, machinery, people, all making shoes, redundantly. What they fail to see is the knowledge about how to make shoes efficiently that ebbs and flows through those same enterprises. This is the core flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, actually, which was the basis of Marx's understanding of economics.

The Labor Theory of Value will tell you that the value of a product is determined by the resources that went into producing it, material, energy and labor. But it omits the knowledge required to produce the product and the right knowledge can decrease the resource requirements by orders of magnitude. Capitalism works because it incentivizes the creation of knowledge that enables more efficient production, as well as the creation of better products (where "better" means "optimized to consumer desires in context").

This is why the 10 shoe factories end up being more efficient than one.

But that's not where capitalism provides the biggest efficiency boost to the economy. The biggest boost comes from the knowledge it generates about the most efficient way to allocate capital. Wall Street looks on its face like an incredible waste of money. All of those people generating massive personal incomes by "gambling" on stocks and bonds. In truth, that competitive game is the knowledge engine that no central planning board has come remotely close to matching, and certainly has never exceeded. All of the money to be made in trading incentivizes brainpower to concentrate on solving the problem of making sure that the most productive enterprises have the resources they need.

Any system that fails to replace the knowledge generation capitalism provides will ultimately be far less efficient, and will generate production shortfalls. No one has yet proposed any system that even attempts to cover that critical gap.

So far, the absolute best economic structure we've devised -- as evidenced by actual outcomes, not just theory -- is lightly-fettered capitalism overlaid with a redistributive social safety net.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.