Anyone who believes this is good work and helping the world is deluded. It's full on race to the bottom, treat people like robots, surveillance state stuff.
I am convinced that crypto/blockchains are slowly and pointlessly re-encountering the same problems that existing centralised systems and agencies were setup to solve.
It’s as if we are all disregarding the centuries of evolution that has gone into creating what we already have today. Systems that, whilst sometimes flawed, for the most part enable us to live our daily lives freely and easily. Systems that already have means of verifying people when you need to make an important transaction and that already allow for trust and stability. As the essay mentions making people the agents of their own verification with documents that you’d have to backup forever would be an absolute nightmare.
There is a reason we have centralised systems and there is a reason we can’t escape them.
Thanks to everyone for your replies below, they provided me with some really useful insights and I understand that it's definitely less directly polluting than fossil fuels and that it's also part of an interim plan.
However. I still think humanity can do better.
If we put all the energy, resources and research that we are putting into nuclear into truly sustainable energy like wind, solar, wave and geothermal, which to my knowledge produce less or no byproducts, then that would be best.
It's unfortunate that the world can't take an aligned approach and build solar farms in deserts, wind farms at sea, wave energy on coastlines and then just export it all fairly to countries. I think I'm almost campaigning for energy as a global right and not for sale as a commodity.
My only question about nuclear is why is it okay to bury the nuclear waste?
I can understand that it might be fine to bury small amounts in specific stores but if countries slowly adopt nuclear energy at scale then over time won’t we be burying a lot of waste that, correct me if I’m wrong, has to be stored for thousands of years? I don’t understand how this can be sustainable long term. I also think it’s maybe arrogant of us to assume that it will always be safe to just store it and that something won’t happen that could disrupt that.
I’m no expert on this though so if someone has a great explanation I’d love to understand it.
Distribution is the most underrated, most difficult part of creating a tech company.
In the UK Squarespace peddles the slogan 'a website makes it real'. This is very misleading. Making the website is the easy part, being found if you have no prior audience, no experience with SEO or a lot of money for ads is incredibly hard. In my opinion breaking into the tech world now is much harder than it was 5 years ago regardless of how good your product is.
Totally agree with this. We'll just end up with more waffling long form content packed with videos and distractions to encourage users to spend more time trying to find what they were originally looking for.
This is very cool. I’d also like to see a Linux version.
Also looking at their job spec for full stack developers and nice to see a company focused on server rendered html. No react, no graphQL, no JSON apis. Should be lightening fast and as a dev I like the fact they are choosing a stack that’s appropriate for their product (an ecom marketplace). I find that a lot of time is lost these days to fixing overly engineered stacks when the end user just wants to see a pretty simple, nicely designed HTML page at the end.
Ha, I totally agree with this. I have seen so many of those big empty buses with just 1 or 2 people in them. Perhaps self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles will be the solution to this.
Cars offer a level of freedom far beyond that of public transport.
That doesn’t mean they are the best vehicle to offer that freedom and electric vehicles will definitely be an improvement over ICE vehicles but in my experience as soon as you’re outside of major metropolitan cities public transport options fall apart and are often incredibly inconvenient compared to owning a car.
Maybe the solution would be to build better public transport systems outside of major cities but to do that requires funding and local governments (in the UK at least) seem to be chronically underfunded so I doubt that it will become a reality anytime soon.
People aren’t always choosing cities, there are greater work opportunities in cities and so that is where people have to go. This was true of factory work in the past when people migrated in droves from farms to work in factories because that was their only option and moving to work in cities for office jobs has just been the latest form of this.
Many people (although not all) would choose space in the countryside over dense in the city if they had a choice. I imagine this becomes even more likely as people have families and begin to prioritise other life aspects over and above work.
I think this is a good thing provided it doesn’t take from people’s annual leave allowance.
Many people feel pressure to always be “on” and are tied endlessly to programs like Slack. Many people also aren’t good at managing their own time in a remote setting or properly stepping away from work when it ends. This will likely be a welcome break for those people.