There's miseries in all stages of life. I've known people that still enjoyed life into their 80s and even 90s. I'm not very afraid of being physical uncomfortable, and I enjoy being here enough to want to fight for more time.
I'm old enough to see some the advances in medical care different family members were able to receive when they became very ill over the decades. I'm young enough to be optimistic that when it's my turn the treatments available will be even more significant.
There's a certain quality of life I wouldn't want to spend a prolonged time in. I understand your point about not wanting to be in bad health. Most of the activities I do that will likely prolong my life (diet, exercise, manage stress, build social bonds, supplements, pharmacology, screenings) will also increase my likelihood of prolonging the amount of time I have in good health.
Why am I interested in living longer? I think it's better than the alternative.
According to the article, the game developers plan on removing exclusive access to the underlying blockchain that is governing the rules of the game. This means other game clients can be created, and activity with the in-game blockchain can be unlocked in ways never intended for by the game developers.
It's certainly unique and ambitious. It's more than the standard web3 playbook of slapping a blockchain on traditional applications. It's an opportunity to extend/mod an MMO in a way that can maintain a functional economy. I wish them luck.
Exactly, winning the lottery is massively life changing. This is actually something I think people don't understand about the psychology of lottery. In some regards it doesn't matter if the money is $50M or $500M for most players even though that has a huge impact on the EV.
It means that even though there are members in the guild/union, the company NYT negotiates individually with every member of the guild/union instead of going through the guild/union.
The entire worker benefit of the union is collective bargaining and NYT has rejected working with the unions.
This could be a blueprint for how other tech departments unionize, but I suspect NYT is a unique case because of their politics. Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-union inside their own house? This gives the workers more leverage than they would otherwise have in other companies.
In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union consulting firm would have been called in to bust things up before it ever got this far.
I get excited when Toyota does a major model does a refresh. The Corolla is likely the #1 selling car model globally, so it has a major impact whenever they change something.
Hopefully your projects aren't too ingrained in the github ecosystem for migrating to be an issue. It's a bug tracker, a feature request tracker, a patch tracker ,a wiki, a release repository, plus an onramp to all sorts of azure functionality with gh actions.
I think it's disappointing that the default toolchain for collaborating on free and open source software includes GitHub which is very much not free and open source, and is backed by Microsoft which has a mixed history in regards to it's relationship with open source software.
It's blatantly about international power. Technology is seen as a bottle neck to limit China's power on several fronts. Economic power, military power, scientific power, technological power.
Freight -- Ideally this causes more investment into freight rail and more freight to be moved by rail/boat. This might cause short term price increases to expand the infrastructure, but long term it's much cheaper/greener/efficient to move this stuff on rail. Last mile (maybe last 100 miles) will always be by truck, but we have way too much long haul stuff.
Public Transport -- If tax payers are currently paying for the external costs of public transportation (via taxes to repair roads) then it won't cost anymore public money if taxpayers continue to cover that cost. For private busses this is a case of tax payers unfairly subsiding their external costs.
Yes. In regions where real estate prices explode many people are forced out of their homes because they cannot pay the increased tax. This specifically hits senior citizens hard. It's not uncommon for a property to increase it's taxes >30% some years in these boom towns. This creates an economic burden on long term residents, that is mostly used to pay for infrastructure that is needed to accommodate newcomers.
> Copper is of course valuable enough that at times people have stolen copper wiring to sell it for recycling. I don't know whether that's a thing today.
You can scrap copper for anywhere between $1-$3/lb depending on quantity, quality, and location. Copper is commonly recycled.
Right now we have a common architecture where users upload files to a central service, and that central service then forwards the content to other users. This is true of services like Youtube, Zoom, etc. With 1Tb/s content creators could serve the content from their own network. This would allow for platforms that have much lower operating costs, and could offer much more generous revenue share. Perhaps a peer-to-peer agreement could occur, where different nodes in the network will cache and reserve each other's files to respond to highly viral content.
I would also disagree with the thesis that internet speeds in the US have stagnated. In 2014 I had about 80Mbps. Today I have about 1500Mbps. On west coast cities I see high end condos with access to speeds up to 7000Mbps. Even my friends in pretty rural locations in 'fly over' states have access to hundreds of mbps with the latest federal grants to build fiber in rural areas. In one case I know someone that skipped from 52k to 200mbps fiber, with cable internet never offered to his house.
Earlier you said "There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries." I think the lost opportunity value of dicking around would be about equal between wealthy countries and developing countries. You can go to the beach/lake/woods, drink all night, play video games, and binge TV most places in the world. Maybe the wealthy countries would have nicer TVs and more expensive intoxicants, but it's basically the same thing everywhere.
Out of all of Japan's problems, I think the fundamental root is they need to import a significant amount of energy. They do not have significant coal, oil, uranium. They have limited access to solar and wind for their population size. To offset all of their energy imports, they need to work very hard to produce a lot of exports.
The economic troubles are centered around having to pay a premium to import energy. The birth rate is negatively impacted by the economic situation. Their foreign policy has to keep energy access as a main priority.