It also seems to me that improving public and mass transit would be a more proximate solution to traffic deaths. Every one will die of some cause or another. as medicine improves the share of deaths due to accidents should increase. Even with increasing medical capacity to treat diseases traffic deaths only account for 1.5 % of all annual deaths. Maybe silicon valley would be better to spend its talents improving health care and preventative medicine. But that is not as sexy to pitch to wall street and the public as Jetsons fantasies. Recently Silicon Valley's contribution to healthcare was Theranos, who Tim Draper still believes was unfairly maligned by the press.
Maybe they remain poor because of brain drain. Perhaps we are hurting them by allowing immigration so their best and brightest can contribute to the Juiceros of SV.
Does silicon valley think they can do anything, regardless the industry, better than the incumbents? It is easy to disrupt (when capital is cheap) but harder to improve. I think expectations of technological progress have become untethered from reality (as happened in the last dot-com boom and bust 20 years ago). This time the bust may be even worse.
I am not sure if at this time the (south) East Asian buyers of ivory care about its provenance (i.e. if it is morally sourced). Do tusks have DNA anyway? Maybe in the future they will (care about sustainable sourcing). Why not farm elephants? People have farmed Rhinos and stockpiled the horns but cannot legally sell them due to prohibition. So wild Rhinos are still poached. Correction I guess it is now legal to sell farmed Rhino horns in SA.
I have experience with PC engines boards in the past. They are good quality but the price is about 5 times what I am looking for, e.g. something about $20-30 to build a competitive network appliance with.
Although it is extremely unpopular I hold the opinion that it is possible that there may be genetic differences in intelligence (defined as the ability to succeed in a modern technological society) among human populations. Is it possible that by aiding poor nations (increasing birth rate, decreasing mortality) we are actually subsidizing stupidity in less fit subpopulations and decreasing the evolutionary fitness of the human species as whole? I don't know the answer, but scientific research into this question, unfettered by politically correct presuppositions would be interesting.
The stupidest thing about ivory seizures is that they destroy the ivory (sometimes millions of dollars in a blaze), creating market scarcity and fuelling further poaching by thus subsidizing prices. Elephants should be farmed and their Ivory should be harvested periodically. Obviously prohibition has not and will not work.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. What is the future of email? How will person to person text communications evolve so that they are more secure, in your opinion.
Would not make me sad to get bought up (lol). My goal is to make money not sell certificates as a hobby. Do you have experience in this area? Care to share? I am just interested if reselling is economically viable at this time. There seems to be a glut of resellers on the Internet. I am interested in first hand experiences to better understand the market place before investing time in creating my own site.
Many businesses can't use Let's Encrypt for various reasons. I am not talking about certs just for someone's personal blog. I don't think Let's Encrypt can provide equivalent functionality to an EV SSL cert, for example.