That just means you need to change your business model to one where the longer people stay, the more they spend. In the case of services around EV chargers, the sweet spot is about 30 minutes. You want to structure your offerings so that it takes a half hour to consume most of your amenities. Have a few extra options for people who might stay longer, but 30 minutes is the target.

So, what do you offer people who are traveling (other than fuel)? Bathrooms, obviously, but that only takes five minutes and you can't charge any money for it (not in the US, anyway; people expect bathrooms to be free for paying customers). If you're selling them gasoline, there's not much time left after the bathroom break, so you offer them snacks and sodas. If you're selling them electricity, you still have them for 25 minutes, which is just about right for a fast food meal plus some snacks for the road.

Your advantage with EV chargers is that your customer base is more "captive". With gasoline cars, they'll often stop for gas, then head to a restaurant a few miles down the road, maybe in the next town. But with EVs, they eat within walking distance of the chargers. They'll often do some shopping, too, if you can find the right goods.

One option to exploit this is to build amenities around your chargers, the "travel plaza" model. Another is to find a location with good travel amenities and put your chargers there, getting local businesses to pay you for the customers you bring them.

That's the price to low Earth orbit. The orbit will just decay and it'll fall back into the atmosphere. You want this thing in the sun. That's about the most expensive place you could try to get to in our solar system. Delta-V is a cruel mistress. We have the technology to store stuff in really good containers now, and put those in a geologically stable location. You don't need to just dump stuff down a hole anymore.

The thing to be careful with, and why MAID needs sufficient oversight, is because there's a surprising number of people, like yourself, who think most people would be better off dead. And those people end up infiltrating the MAID ecosystem. That's where we need constant vigilance.

The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

Sorry, I worded (or recalled) that a little wrong. She didn't originally request MAID. She was seeing a counsellor for depression, partly due to being unable to pay her rent, and the counsellor suggested MAID as a possible solution for her. That's where it seemed to go off the rails.

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).

Most of the concern these days isn't some old notion of it being a "sin". It's concern over abuse. That is, are there children in the picture that are trying to convince an elderly person to get MAID? Or is the system incentivized to offer MAID to people who are no longer paying into the system? In one case in Canada, a woman who was getting therapy for depression because she couldn't pay rent was *offered* MAID as a solution to her problems. I think this crosses an ethical line. There's a difference between someone requesting it, and it being offered as a solution. These are difficult ethical issues, and there's no simple right/wrong answers.

Yes, and this is the main problem that needs oversight. Most people are OK with MAID if a person is in pain and won't get better, and is lucid enough to understand the decision they're making. But you're correct that a system that has an incentive to offer it to a person who isn't paying into the system and is just a cost... that's an ethical problem. There was a woman in Canada who was approved for MAID, and her reason was that she was poor and couldn't pay her rent. There's just too many cases like this in Canada, which is why the inquiry recommended improvements. I'm just saying that anyone else who wants to try this should learn from our mistakes in Canada.

In Canada the law wasn't supposed to allow MAID for people with only mental health conditions, but an inquiry determined that the system was approving it for practically anyone who asked. It needs to have proper oversight that the rules are clear and are being followed to maintain public trust.

There are some examples of good writing out there (Andor is the most recent example I can think of). But the last few years has been particularly bad. From what I've heard, there was a short-sighted push to not just hire a whole bunch of diverse young writers, but to *get rid of* the old grey haired ones. The logical consequence is that you lose the necessary mentorship to support those young writers, and teach them the craft. Exhibit A is Disney's big flop: "Wish". This was supposed to be a big 100th anniversary movie for Disney, but the animation and writing was so atrocious that people in the industry couldn't believe Disney's famed animation department would release such an amateur movie. Insiders told the same story: management pushed out all the knowledgeable experienced people and replaced them with fresh new blood.