True, except that gold's actual usage price -- for industry and jewelry -- hasn't been its trading price for a very long time. As long as people have viewed it as a store of wealth its price has been inflated by that perception.

If there's cellphone signal enough for voice, there's enough to run an app that is designed to handle the low bandwidth.

But now you're shifting from Colorado to Canada. See what I mean by constant retreat?

Besides, like I said, I drove through the mountains of western Canada and always had enough cell signal. And caching is still a thing. GPS still works as long as one can see 3 satellites, and some can use the EU and RU versions to improve accuracy even more.

Worst case, Starlink is deploying cellphone technology, so we'll have signal from satellites soonish.

Fire easily destroys or disables concentrated "force loss multiplier" fratricidal storage designs. Not just accidents, but terrorist-style attacks can take them out easily via drones using simple electric triggers.

https://theconversation.com/wh...

Disperse batteries far and wide and they'll be much more difficult to interfere with if they're designed to function without grid power during emergencies. A controlled, graceful shutdown is better than abrupt power interruption.

Building a reliable long-range monoplane in 1927 was a milestone. Flying it solo from New York to Paris was a publicity stunt.

Which of these two actions do people remember and celebrate today?

Man, it's just constant retreat with you, isn't it?
You're seriously saying Alma doesn't have cellphone signal? I've lived in a smaller town and still had signal.

Generally speaking, those installing EV charging stations want to be able to bill for it. Which means that the station itself needs connectivity, even if it doesn't need to be much. They need a big fat pipe of electricity as well.
Sounds like an excellent spot for a cell phone tower, if one isn't already in range.

Besides that, I managed to drive from Alaska to Florida, through Canada, without ever being out of cellphone signal.

Worst case, the app developers are aware that you might be out of signal occasionally. Therefore they cache information.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

Great. New fab in the West. It's just power stuff; silicon carbide FET and whatnot. Still, if concern for "sovereignty" is what it takes for bedroom community Europe to get off the dime, then good for them. Better than being industrial vassals of the US, China and Russia, which is where they've been heading. Feel free to make more "sovereign" fabs.

The less of it the better because quantity of life works against quality of life, see third world fecundity if in doubt.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.