The insurance companies didn't say it will destroy capitalism. Places with increased risk due to climate change won't be suitable for investing in. If you can't get insurance at a reasonable rate then what you are doing is to risky. You aren't entitled to cheap insurance especially if you are doing something risky. You aren't entitled to a mortgage or any other secured borrowing especially if the lenders think your collateral could be destroyed.

Many laptops are at least partially subsidize by the bloatware that comes with them. Fortunately for a laptop you can just wipe them and reinstall the OS. Not sure how you do that with a TV.

I've inheritted the worst project I have ever seen. Maybe not the worst code but the worst run project. Not a single comment in the code, argument and variable names that are sometimes close but not quite right. Function pointers and other indirection for no good reason. Duplicate variables for the same data just in different units. (temperature is stored 10 f$#king different ways). 100,000 line header files with only 3 relevant defines. The AI hasn't been useless. It might have given me some insight but after two months I am now faster using the old algorithmic tools, paper and a bit of crying. Honestly no risk to my job. The rest of the people on this project could be replaced with rocks. They do negative work. In that respect, there are lots of "developers" that could be replaced.

The earth has a mass of 6x10^24 kg. A sphere built at Mercury's orbit would be 5x10^22m^2. So you would have 100kg of matter to make each square meter of sphere. I suspect that is 10,000x more than you would need.

Also most of the earth is iron and nickel so 100kg of steel. And before you say it. The only tensile stress on the sphere is it's own mass. The point of the shell is only to capture energy so thin is better. A really thin sphere could be made with existing steel.

We see this all the time in law enforcement all over the world and I think it is getting worse. No one ever gets in trouble for escalating a situation. This could have been a minor suspicion that someone could have quietly checked and decide there is nothing here but instead they escalate it a little and someone else sees it and it escalates a bit more and pretty soon a joke on a private chat results in fighters escorting a plane back. https://www.news.com.au/travel...

You go out with friends, you eat dinner, you might shop or do some other activity. The restaurant and bar experience has gotten worse and significantly more expensive. In Canada, bars and restaurants have gone to all hard surfaces with no sound absorption. They are now so loud that you can't have a conversation, only eat, drink and leave. So the over all experience of going out with my friends to see a movie has become less appealing. I don't think it is about the quality of the movies. Maybe the 15 minutes of car and cellular ads. I think it is just a cumulative decline in the over all experience of the entire evening.

Also the younger generation is a lost cause for theatres. It is now too expensive for me to take my 5 kids out for a meal before the movie and the movie experience isn't anymore appeal to them than watching on a 75" TV at home. They will never feel that nostalgia of sticky floors, the smell of popcorn and the excitement of the crowd.

Half the population won't do trades and if we somehow changed our attituteds to not look down on them there would be an outrage that men are over represented in these good jobs. People in the trades would be labelled sexist and firms would have quotas and be shamed if they didn't meet them.

There are a limited number of tickets to an event and finding the market price is difficult. Fans somehow think market price for tickets is what they want to pay. Sorry, if someone is willing to pay $5000 so their daughter can have front row for Tailor Swift, then that is the market price. The proper way to have sold concert tickets would have been a revers dutch aution. This would have maximized the profit of the venue and act, ensured those willing to pay the most would get their seats and eliminated the profit of scalpers. It would also mean tickets would more easily be transferable. Instead we got a disfunctional market and TicketMaster took advantage of it. My Uncle is a band manager for some big 80s/90s acts and he saw this coming. He's been fight ticketmaster and when possible books venues that aren't tied to ticketmaster even if he loses money. Every year it gets harder and harder though.

The point of a Dyson sphere is to harness a non-trivial fraction of a stars energy output. If you can harness even a few percent of a stars output you can disassemble entire plants. The binding energy of the Earth, the amount of energy to break the earth down into individual atoms and push them apart so that they won't reform is 2.5x10^32 J or about a week of energy from our sun.

I've lived and worked in the USA many times over the last 30 years. I've written software for credit bureaus, bank security and the SWIFT network. The USA has the most incompetent banking system in the world. They aren't corrupt but they are mind bogglingly dumb and they honestly are getting worse. Opening accounts, getting approved for credit and moving money now takes longer than it did 25 years ago. Transactions that are instant in third world countries still take multiple days in the US. Documentation or even source code for many systems doesn't exist. I've parsed records that have had fields that are fixed width, delimited, {type, length, value}, ASCII, EBCDIC and binary packed decimal all in the same record.

I understand the USA had a system that worked in the 60s but things do improve over 60 years.

That's the best guess anyway. So if there was an outside observer they would probably see a black hole. Does it mean we are in one? Probably not. It's probably more of a completeness of the rules of the universe.

It isn't costs and wages it is the portion of the economy's good and services that we leave for Gen Z. There is a fixed amount of housing that becomes available each month. If you doubled Gen Z's salaries, 100% of that increase would go into their rent. We distorted the entire economy so that retired people can quit working and live the same lifestyle paid for by various direct transfers to them from the young and the fact that their homes are so insanely over valued. Homes that will straddle a young person with a life of mortgage payments when they hand over that 1.3M for a rundown oversized shed, err starter home. If you gave every Gen Z $1000 extra a month their consumption wouldn't change. We would just increase rents, house prices and taxes and take all of that $1000.

Canada is worse than the USA. Here we have free healthcare but only for people who already have a family doctor, that is old people. We have benefits for fulltime employees that somehow skew heavily towards helping elderly workers with health problems. Young people get 10 + 11 days off work a year. Some older workers get 35 + 11. Housing in far more messed up than the USA and taxes are higher. We also look down on any starter jobs for young men. Any jobs that require physical labour. As a result we have a shortage of plumbers, electricians, natural gas technicians, etc. All the skills that you might need to fix a home.

There were multiple companies involved in this. They all screwed up. Short of assigning blame and bankrupting the companies nothing else will stop these companies from screwing up again, and that isn't a viable solution. Most companies fundamentally don't understand security. Part of it is willful neglect, part of it is the consequences are so minimal, but the biggest part is the people making the decisions don't understand security even well enough to delegate it. They can't evaluate if their money spent on security is well spent, they don't know the risks and most external auditors are either useless or need a lot of time and a lot of access to the systems.

I worked at Entrust. Our chief security officer was so useless we didn't give him access to our internal threat database and he never asked if there was one. I have no idea what he did and Entrust was once one of the most trusted security companies in the world.

A human in one of these cars will be a passenger. The passenger will not have any situational awareness. The only suitable emergency options for the passengers are to request the device stop and to vacate it. I'm fairly sure an immediate stop button, i.e. lock the brakes, would make the device less safe.

We need GOOD regulations. And often well meaning regulations over time result in death by a thousand cuts. Some regulations sound good when you hear them but when you have to implement them you realize they are nearly impossible, or you get two regulations that can't be reconciled. You can only add regulations. No one can remove a bad one, or ones that become redundant because if something goes wrong, the person who removed the regulation could be blamed. There is no upside for the individuals responsible for the regulations to cleaning up regulations so they only grow (organizational psychology). They grow to the point that it becomes viable ignoring them or creating a whole new industry to satisfy the need (think Uber vs Taxis).