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).

Canada will never threaten not to sell potash to the USA. Stopping the sale would cause a 2-3% drop in US farm yields. The USA would continue feeding the same amount to their livestock and converting to methanol. Americans are rich. They would likely eat the same. The US exports though might fall by half. That pushes poor people all over the world to starvation. We would then have a domino affect of countries banning food export. In 6 months Canada would have made enemies of 90% of the world population. The USA, Canada and France are the only countries to be net exporters of calories every year 30.

I'm always amazed that the opinions of those with no kids seems to drown out the opinions of those of us with large families. It's like asking the coach of the losing team for advice.

If you want large families you have to give young couples stable homes.

This is a consumption problem, not a wealth or income problem. In Canada the median home sale price in 2023 was $650,000. Double that if you want to live close to good jobs, shopping and don't want to depend on a car every time you step out the door. Few young men have stable jobs that pay enough for them to rent their own place and still have any money for savings and a life. Buying a home or renting is a huge consumption transfer from young to old. The majority of Canadians will be in their 30s when they have the ability to consume enough housing to live as a couple. Then they will have to sacrifice some of that consumption for a baby.

If you want an average birth rate of over 2 then many women will need to have 2 babies and a large number will need to have 3 or 4. If a woman only has her first baby after 30 then she didn't do it because she was ready, she likely did it because she was worried about never having one. She isn't going to have more than 2. To have more than 2 babies a woman has to start in her mid 20s.

You want to increase birthrates? Change how consumption is distributed. Give young people a lot more of the output of the economy. It's probably to institutionalized the consumption transfer from young to old in Canada but maybe other countries still have hope.

You can really feel for some of the devs. https://github.com/electronica...

I sympathize with the goals of the left but they can't build anything and they are hostages to their ideologies. Green Peace and other "green" parties killed 60s nuclear even though it was safe enough and the alternative was coal. As far as BP and other fossil fuel producers they are following the rules of society. Society wants fossil fuels. If we want to burn less fossil fuels we can't blame BP, we have to, you know, change the f#@king rules so that we aren't incentivized to burn fossil fuels. So tax green house gas emissions but do it for everyone and make sure that the final consumer pays the tax. But the left can't do that because somehow making everyone pay (even though the rich will pay more) is unfair. They would also have to admit to their compliance in supporting coal and through their unions the auto industry. The investors don't care where they invest. They just want the most profit. So change the rules so that investing in environmental capital that eventually works is rewarding to investors.

Note: Historically protecting the environment was a rich person cause. This isn't just because rich people have the extra money to indulge in these things but being rich gives you the flexibility (and confidence) to accept changes. There are times I think the left would like us all to be peasant farmers growing all our own food on tiny plots of land.

If it is inconvienient people will by pass it. People want higher transaction limits. Good security requires the project manager to actually think intelligently about the problem for 5 minutes. ( Collectively all the project managers in the world have never had 5 minutes of intelligent thought). NIST has only just changed their rules to explicitly dissallow password rules like a Capital, small, number, symbol and rotate your password every X days. They finally also dissallowed SMS as a 2FA. Every app wants you to have an account and password. Guess what, most apps aren't important enough for me to create a unique password for, so most people use the same password for everything. (and putting some spin on the app or website as a prefix for you password doesn't add much entropy to your password).

If I make a more secure app people will use my competitors. My app could even be easier to use but if it doesn't follow the user flow they are used to they won't use it.

I would recomend banking from home but my bank has a $2000 transfer limit on the web app and a $15000 limit on the phone app. My rent is $2500, guess which I have to use.

People are dumb. Regulations will likely make it worse as people will all use similar work arounds to make their lives easier.

The pay gap only partially shows the problem and we don't have a wealth problem. Real wealth is the means of production, I don't care who owns the means of production as long as they use it well. The real problem is the distribution of consumption. Musk might be worth 250M but he is mostly homeless. He doesn't eat 10x what I eat, he doesn't wear 100x more clothes than me. But we do have 60 million Americans over 65 who continue to consume like they did before they retire. They still live in big houses near where jobs, shopping and entertainment are. They now consume that vast majority of healthcare. They eat, travel and vacation far more than people in their 20s. Insanely over priced homes are a consumption transfer from young to old. Every benefit system and government bailout is a consumption transfer from young to old. Most of the farm subsidize and subsidies to depressed areas are transfers from younger people to older people.

Agreed that index funds are better for investors individually but that doesn't change the facts. Active funds are slow to react and they are the only ones with lots of managed money. Active funds are the ones that will change the stock prices. The index funds only follow price changes.

I was dating someone who ran a mutual fund with a couple billion in assets. Just keeping up with everything takes over 100 hours of work per week. If a stock or even an entire segment of the market is miss priced by the market it would take tens of hours to convince her that she could take advantage of this. She had a team of analysts so for her to react she needed an analyst to recognize the miss pricing, figure out how long the market might take to correct itself, figure out the risk/reward and then be convinced to take an action. The information to make a decision has a cost in terms of her time and the time of her analysts. As a result her fund will likely miss a miss price or if they do notice it, they will be slow to react. The nimble, smaller players who are concentrating on small segments of the market though might see a price miss match but they are likely to starve to death just watching the market before that opportunity arrives.

PS - never date anyone who measures their free time in hours per month.