Sounds like a win to me if your privacy oriented service ends up being private enough to enrage authoritarians.

The price you pay for a good or service mostly captures labour costs that went into it.

Depreciation and maintenance costs for a taxi vehicle only account for a small portion of the fare. The taxi driver's wages are the most significant portion. Even then, maintenance and fuel costs also contain significant amounts of labour, such as extraction, manufacturing, transportation and the mechanic's wages.

It's inevitable that automation makes jobs redundant. It has happened throughout the industrial age and continues today. Many computer peripherals are named after jobs that no longer exist.

Automation replaces jobs and makes the prices of the output from these replaced jobs significantly lower. I'd make an educated guess that labour-intensive products see their prices slashed by one or two orders of magnitude when significant new forms of automation come to that production line.

More automation makes more things affordable, and many jobs become obsolete. Simultaneously, the affordability of formerly expensive products makes the demand for those increase, and with it the offer, until labour costs rise to become the most significant portion of the price of these products, as automation always leaves gaps to be filled by relatively-expensive humans.

A concrete example of this is travel. Seventy years ago it was significantly more expensive, labour-intensive, and dangerous to travel by commercial airline. Two hundred years ago, during the age of sail, it was even more time-consuming, labour-intensive and risky to travel by sailboat. Long-distance travel was never as affordable as it is today, when people on modest wages travel frequently to exotic destinations by air.

In conclusion, I present the argument that automation is always a net good, and our general quality of life will improve thanks to the current wave of automation. As always, the fears of massive long-term unemployment will again turn out to be unjustified.

Fantastic post!

Add to this that hydrogen molecules diffuse through pretty much every material, making tanks that hold it brittle over time, prone to failure.

Hydrogen wants to react with oxygen extremely badly. The atmosphere has a lot of oxygen, and with a bit of heat, any volume of hydrogen that gets in contact with atmospheric oxygen will combust in an explosive way.

I don't want to be among the people who pioneer travel in hydrogen-propelled vehicles. I would have to see it operating safely at a commercial scale for a decade to even consider boarding one.

I agree with your sentiment partially. X is no bastion of free speech. We need to make a social network with a true uncensored P2P backend where absolutely everything goes if you want a bastion for free speech. It seems that nothing that has to live in servers that can be located and shut down by State forces is ever going to be a bastion of free speech.

We're sorry we got caught.

Rust didn't exist when Linux started. It exists now, and it is superior to C in every way that matters. Linux moving to Rust makes sense, but it is impossible to port the entire codebase safely and in a short period of time such that it becomes a Rust project rather than a C project, so the next best alternative is to have it written in both programming languages, with the hope that more code will be written in Rust as opposed to C in the future. It makes sense not only to make interfaces that work well with Rust, but also to encourage and push for those changes. Linus is, as usual, doing what is right despite the usual stupid opposition.

Donald Trump is El Presidente. If Hillary Clinton had won, she would be La Presidenta. Spanish is my mother tongue. Please don't butcher it.

Holy shit, I didn't think of that one. The Saudi Arabia government having access to all that is too much of a risk.

Even em-dashes do not reliably work to detect AI text. Em-dashes work really wellâ"and I use them regularlyâ"to add context where parentheses aren't appropriate. I am not an artificial intelligenceâ"or so I say.

It's a prison that you can't see or smell or touch. A prison for your mind.

From the impact that Twitter had in politics over the last two decades, including the X era, it would not be difficult to draw the conclusion that microblogging does not lead to pro-social discourse. Bluesky seems to also comprise insulated fora where conspiracies and mostly-unsound ideas are bounced back and forth, used by people to negotiate and express group allegiances rather than engage in the style of conversation that lead us to grow and examine our own positions, ideas, values, and even the facts that we accept. It's just ideologically committed (compromised?) people flinging poo at each other. It's what groups of people who want to fight wars do, not people who would rather collaborate to support and improve complex modern civilisations. I'm out. I recommend you get out or these platforms too. Maybe only use them to discuss hobbies and engage with similarly constructive communities. Do not discuss or consume political and ideological clap-trap in short-form social media please.

How is your message tagged Troll? There is a large contingent of people here who are ideologically compromised.

What you explain here is exactly what I have been saying about covid since I looked at the numbers: it was less of a threat than the measures to contain it warranted. Putting the entire world in quarantine and stopping most economic activity for years was not justified to give a few extra years of life at best to the oldest and most frail people among us. The cost was too high for the benefit. But the pathetic Zeitgeist in the world right now can be personified by a neurotic old schoolmarm: the spirit of a gyno-gerontocracy.

Your wife's father was old. Evidence that the covid vaccine caused his dementia has to be a lot stronger than developing symptoms three days after taking it, given the large-scale vaccination trials and subsequent mass administration across the world, that didn't lead to widespread dementia. I don't expect that you'll use conspiracy theories to try to explain this, because you seem to be intellectually honest and respect data and evidence.

I cannot express with words more eloquent than yours what my assessment of the situation is.

I concur, but look at other answers. A lot of people don't get it. That's fine. More money will be wasted because it cannot possibly be due to wokeness, wokeness is awesome, you bigot. Let them waste their money. Along with their money, their power will go down the drain too, then new people will come to make good things, for which they'll be rewarded, and the market will heal.

Yes, but it is not explicitly religious, if anything maybe accidentally so.