With any luck, by the time we're serious about sending big spacecraft out and about we'll have figured out a workable fusion drive. You'd still need to launch them from space since they're a little spicy from a "don't stand downwind" perspective, but unimaginably better than using nukes against pusher.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I didn't feel like this article necessarily idolized it; the author seemed pretty even-handed about strengths and weaknesses.
The interesting question in all of these kinds of things is "are there ideas we can take to gain the strengths of other systems or patch the weaknesses in ours?". Looking at Japan specifically, I think I speak for most westerners in saying that if we could get a little more stability and less financial-quarter-driven behavior without taking the whole kit of lifetime employment and zombie companies, that would be a good thing. The author points out just how bundled that is, so it's a tough nut to crack.
One model that does give us that is the 'Untouchable visionary CEO' of Jobs and Musk, but I think the popularity of that approach is also limited, partially because of all the not so visionary CEOs trying to be Jobs, and partially because working for those guys is terrible. They inevitably seem to become tyrants.
Most Americans I know are familiar with the unending work culture of Japanese white collar workers (if only a parody version of it), and want no part of it.
I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
Let me filter and alert based on a distance, not just sort. e.g. "Lathe" within 100 miles of Baltimore. GovDeals lets you do this, but their distance filter is very inaccurate.
I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).
We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).
Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.
The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.
Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.
I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.
Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.
Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.
The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.
Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.
I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.
If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.
For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.
Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.
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meet.hn/city/38.8950368,-77.0365427/Washington