Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.

Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.

In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.

If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.

What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?

Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.

Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ahh found the 2b2t player.

I've been a /.'er since the beginning. This isn't even my original UID. I think that one was like 50k or so.

This site started off as somewhat libertarian anarchy. The old adage of, "We just move packets, any inspection of content is irrelevant" Granted, there is some content that is truly horrible, reprehensible, with IRL victims, but at the time of 1mbps internet connections it was deemed, "Too much overhead" for deep packet inspection.

Yet here we are close to 30 years later. 3 letter agencies routinely install their servers in ISP's to do just that. Speaking of ISP's, what ever happened to the 1000's we used to have? Seems like the choices either died out or were bought up. Internet is no longer an ala-cart option of free thought and speech, but rather the bourgeoisie hidden microphone installed on every computer, every phone, designed to listen to your every thought and whim. Even as I type this now, I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere, who is not /. is logging it as a part of the overall profile of t0qer, so they can sell that info to a marketeer.

We used to keep our thoughts and politics private. I never remember my parents, or my parents friends, or my friends parents talking about politics as much as we do now. It just seems like this thirst has been created in the collective consciousness that we have to share. Why? So a bunch of people we never met, or cared about prior to this, our facebook "friends" or our instagram "followers" can shower us with clicking a graphic of a thumb pointed up? The pavlovian response generated I guess in some ways can trace its roots back to here. It's to late for Karma, but if I had *just* commented when this article was hot, I'd be refreshing this comment to see if it got up or down votes.

I hope we can break free from this as a society.

It's almost like you're a bot that didn't read my comment.

You said:
>Gas was cheap

I said: personal autonomous electric air travel

You said:
> Furthermore you have to figure in the cost of your labor in operating the vehicle

And I said: Cars too will also see improvements in AI and self-driving.

Like I said, the future will be personal AI driven autonomous electric vehicles. Have you seen how cheap Chinese EV's are?

and I'll probably be downvoted for saying it but;

We've always romanticized train travel. It's like the movie Titanic, but nobody is going to drown, no ship is going to sink. People from different walks and stations of life are forced together for an extended period of time and next thing you know Leo is painting naked chicks in the baggage car.

Yet there's a reason we left it behind... At least in the US. Gas was cheap, cheaper than the cost of buying a family of 4 train passage. You didn't have to share a cabin with strangers. There was some disadvantages, like having to stop to rest and use the restroom, but the door to door travel of a car and being in your own self contained transport outweighed them. In the 40's and 50's trains were still painfully slow. HSR was still in its testing phase.

Jet travel, while like a train (having to share a cabin) didn't have the social experience a train did due to the noise, and short travel time. You don't really get a chance to know people, you put on your headphones and close your eyes until you're at your destination.

Trains have leapfrogged both cars and air travel in terms of speed and environmental friendliness, but they can leapfrog trains right back. Air travels has a security issue which causes most of the delay. This will be mitigated through... wait for it... personal autonomous electric air travel. Like cars, for the sky. Cars too will also see improvements in AI and self-driving. We will likely see a day in the next 20 years where cars will zip along at 100+ mph in dedicated self driving lanes.

If Slashdot had the ability to paste images, that meme would be going up now.

Hmm my slash UID is in the 200k range, yours is in the almost 5 million. I'm gonna guess you're young.

See I'm moving because I can. I've built up a resume over 30 years that any company will look at and say, "We need this guy" but more importantly, these companies ask, "What can we offer this guy to stay with us?" Since Covid, WFH has been a very good bargaining chip.

You're welcome to stay here in a hamster cage, eating my sloppy seconds. I'll be selling my paid off house and moving to the beach where the temperature will always be stable. Hope you like the sound of strangers stomping their feet all night long. Hope you like homeless, crime, piss, shit on the streets. You'll get everything you ever wished for in a "big city." Meanwhile the guys in Atherton, Brisbane, Los Altos, Palo Alto will be relatively immune. A glass of tap water will cost you $1. For the wealthy, they'll sleep on a mattress of $100 bills. They'll complain, "Oh look at the cost of water, we can't even water our lawns, maybe Seven Spirals should only take a shower a month to conserve." You're a "poor" to these people.

You underestimate the direction this is all going in. Enjoy having them force you to sacrifice so they can maintain their lifestyle. They need me more than I need them, but you need them more than they need you. Good luck with that bro.

> The economic theory of eternal growth with finite resources really piss me off.

I see this in the SF Bay area so much. We don't have enough water, enough power, enough freeway for the population. We're not like Manhattan, which has had a nearly limitless supply of water. Now we're building upwards, making the issue of heat islands even worse. Instead of saying, "Hey, let's spread this out a bit so everyone can maintain a decent quality of life" politically we're leaning more towards, "Let's force everyone to live in Hamster Habitats and stop driving"

The only good thing we have in the area is highly rated K-12 schools. Looking forward to when the youngest goes off to college in 2 years and moving out of here.

Maybe it was a bad analogy, but the point I was trying to get to is still solid. We've lost a lot of manufacturing capabilities over the course of my lifetime. Not everybody can learn data abstraction. We need jobs for people who's best effort in life is doing the same repetitive task on an assembly line for 8 hours a day. Without those factories, those people are unable to support themselves, and it goes into a doom loop where we end up with Stockton, or Modesto.

So one day I was in Walmart in Oakland CA. My dad has an old beater sailboat in the area, and I was there getting some food/snacks/drinks. I'm walking by the TV section and this old black lady is arguing with the salesguy.

"I want a TV made in the US"
"Maam, they don't exist anymore"

I started thinking back to my own childhood in the 80s, seeing the Zenith and RCA sets out on the curb, and going into the 90's getting replaced by Sony, Sharp, JVC. Eventually we gave all our LCD tech to China, and they started getting so good at making cheap LCD's, they got cheaper than CRT's. By the time HD CRT's became a thing, it was moot. Chinese LCD TV's took over.

Now I collect, recap, and upgrade CRT's for fun. I guess it just strikes a certain nostalgia for me, but the point I'm winding into with this is Japan went so far in on CRT's by the time LCD's got better, it was too late. They didn't have the manufacturing capability to keep up. Japan, and to a bigger extent the Orion CRT company is gone. That technology is gone. Even if someone finds parts of it, there's nobody that would remember how to build them from scratch, just gone.

That's the real danger of all this letting China do it for us. We will forget how to do it ourselves.

https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITIC...

The above article is around the same time the US started shifting our best technology to China. Silicon Valley had already created the most polluted superfund sites in the nation, and towards the end of the 80's a lot of our assembly, PCB and chip fab started being migrated over there. By 98 we were selling them our satellite launching secrets.

The best way to stay ahead of them is to stop giving them a jump start.

They got some tax wizardry deal with Cupertino where Cupertino surrenders 35% of sales tax generated by apple back to apple.
https://appleinsider.com/artic...

I guess that's the whole idiocracy thing at play right? Paraphrasing, "The world smartest scientist were focused on restoring hair loss and erections"

Anyone old enough to remember these 3dfx commercials?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I sort of feel like this is the punchline with AI right now. We could be using it to accelerate @folding at home or something worthwhile. Instead we're using it to enable the grammatically and artistically challenged.