You have to tax or ban products that use difficult-to-recycle packaging. Waste has a negative value and negative externality. You can't let the free market fix the problem.

Some countries have a $2 of CRV equivalent. That's enough for people to put in the effort to recycle. Alternatively, you can require manufacturers to buy back the waste.

Directly subsidizing building of factories that make highly recyclable or compostable packaging is another option.

Durable goods don't really need recycling rules. We don't use enough for it to matter. Only large objects like cars and buildings need special waste handling.

Touching your passenger has all sorts of potential legal risks, even if most drivers don't realize it.

Self-driving taxis can just build a vibration function into the passenger seats. Once the passenger takes more than 5 minutes to leave, they should flag the ride for a human to check what's going on through the cameras.

An LLM is highly accurate if you provide the relevant text directly in its context. So if you want a better search, you can do RAG, which is use the LLM to generate search terms, pull the relevant text from a database, then use the LLM again to massage the result.

You do realize it doesn't matter whether you like the ideology or not right? Only what the leadership in China thinks matters.

Unfortunately for them, the few examples of Communist dictatorships they can reference all failed, so as far as I can tell, they've gone back to what worked for the previous 2000 years.

That's for the people. For the government, it's about acting with moral virtue and taking care of the masses (so they're convinced to not revolt). You can contrast it with the main alternative government philosophy of the time, which is legalism (basically ruling with strict laws and crushing rebellions with force).

I'll be back as a consultant at triple the rate in less than 18 months to clean up the mess...

Even if you're automating something you yourself do on a regular basis.

This is a general property of the universe: put something under a (metaphorical or literal) microscope and you discover things that are at once obvious and at the same time fantastical.

Making Things is fun and frustrating that way.

Being unaware of where the opponent is and going through the motions of kicking a phantom ball was very much par for the course.

Cupcake, 45% of government work entails coming up with workarounds to problems created by the other 50%. The remaining 5% (at best) is something you might call useful without having to supress laughter.

This extends to contractors. Microsoft is a big one.

Every place I can think of residential water and electricity rates are a whole different animal than commercial and industrial rates.

In my town in particular, the marginal rate for *residential* water use shoots up by a factor of 4 once you go over the threshold for regular domestic consumption. Cook and clean, and you pay a few hundred per quarter. Water your lawn and it's a few thousand.

I imagine if the leftyloons around here ever allowed a datacenter, the water commissioner would be purchasing service trucks with solid gold steering wheels in short order from all the profit such a heavy water user would generate.

Same with power. And taxes. Industrial and commercial property subsidizes a whole lot of infrastructure.

This Austrualian thing is a grandstanding no-op at best.

Except it's not a huge threat. If you look at historical Chinese peasant rebellions and coups, all of them stem from economic failure. Those that are purely ideologically motivated do not succeed.

Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, unlike what you'd learn from Western news media, is not primarily ideologically motivated. The leaders were calling for democracy, but they also had 18% inflation and 100 million people who had government jobs which didn't get raises to adjust for inflation. In fact if the protest succeeded, they might have ended up more socialist rather than capitalist.

No, hurting the US economy is antithetical to his goals. Remember that the main threat to his position is an internal uprising or coup, not the US fighting or winning a war against them. The more stable the international economy, the more stable the domestic one, and the less reason people have to rise up against him.

If you read up on Confucian government philosophy, it's very obvious what he wants is stability above all else.

How do you expect a tiny handful of billionaires to pay trillions? Do you understand a trillion is 1000 billion?

By the way, billionaires do not actually have billions in cash. They have billions of dollars worth of stocks at their current market valuation. But if they really tried to turn all their shares into dollars, the market would collapse, the valuation would fall, and they would not have billions worth of stocks.

The point is that there's no technology gap. If you want to make back trillions of dollars of investment on your data centers, you can't have a competitor that's almost as good, 40% cheaper and open source.

There are only 6 billion internet-connected people in the world. They invested $2.5 trillion. Just to make the investment back, they need everyone to pay roughly $400 each. By the way, in many parts of the world, $400 is twice their annual income.

Landing on the Moon is far easier than landing on Earth. You don't have the ocean rolling your landing platform, no wind to blow your booster over, and the gravity is 1/6th as strong.

You let the tree huggers in to space launch, they'll be demanding six-year-long environmental reviews for every single piece of a moon base or asteroid sampling flight.

Unless the chinese do it, then crickets.