What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even service industries that focus on a more human connection. Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.
And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.
I think in the near term social media can actually have a stabilising effect just because of how much it paralyzes people. It takes emotion and redirects it into something with little real world effect. Whilst most actual power is exercised offline. This sometimes breaks down and the crazy escapes from the internet and reeks havoc. But mostly the geriatrics are left alone to pull the levers of power in relative peace.
Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.
Of course there is a difference. And if you did some kind of scoring exercise you may be able to say that one entity is objectively worse than the other. But so what? That score does not justify the killing of innocent people by either side.
Or this brings power and prestige to the country that hosts it. And it gives clout precisely because it is seemingly wasteful. Finding the energy is a problem for the civilian government who either go "drill baby drill" or throw wind/solar/nuclear at the problem.
The best way to teach history would be to make politicians dig slit trenches and then shell them for a few days. Anything less than that people will always end up regurgitating ethno nationalist bullshit or "geopolitics".
The US seems to be dominated by different right wing meme factions now. A choice between different strains of Maga all of whom would kill thousands in Gaza just to spite the left.
There isn't a real solution. Just an opportunity for a few years of peace where people can do the important things in life. That is no small thing though. The danger is in chasing some quixotic nationalist dream. That is never ever going to work out.
Ultimate power lies with people who can use violence. Its the military and police. Without continued compliance from those groups the status of politicians or royalty could become very tenuous.
And we are specifically talking about an emergency here.
British tradition does have more teeth though. For example whilst the Monarch may not use that power normally they still have it. With support of the Privy council the King absolutely could remove a malicious but democratic government. They are perfectly placed to unify the people, politicians, civic society, judiciary, police and military. And they can do so legally. And this position is defended by the perfectly reasonable response that they would never do that or have any real power. But then who does? The PM can be replaced in an afternoon by a vote. Parliament would need substantial changes of law to do anything.
And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.
As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
At least with Drax the combustion is managed by professionals, can have treatment to remove some emissions, and shoots the pollution high into the atmosphere. Its probably safer to live near Drax than a village full of recreational wood burners.
Maybe some kind of captcha like system could be devised that could be considered a security measure under the DMCA and not allowed to be circumvented. Make the same content available under a licence fee through an API.
And by just trying to reproduce something we are not offering any antidote to the issues incumbent with cloud systems. IMHO the best place to start is by offering something that can provide authentication/authorisation/ZeroTrust networking/API gateways. And ideally do it in a distributed way that can start without needing servers.
Maybe part of a bailout should be IP release for free to American companies. And the same would be true about a bailout of Boeing (for example). Make it easier for other companies to compete and eventually reduce the risk.
Surely hardware has much more of an economic moat than software, services, and payment services. And the manufacturing of that is dominated by China and to a lesser extent Korea and Taiwan. All of whom have an interest in seeing hardware take a greater cut of value and for software to be commoditised. And it is common and possible for powerful countries or regions to build alternatives. India already has a payment system that is larger than Visa for digital and includes P2P and P2M.
It is possible that people knew that animals flew South for winter and just become unknowable. But then scholars tried to apply a new conceptual framework to that. Asking the question was a step forward, even if the hypothesised answer was wrong. Its basically quackary with good intentions. And I expect some people knew all along that birds flew South but lacked the words or the influence to wrap that in an abstract concept that would be taken seriously.
Not sure if ever made a lot of sense to land harrier in an unprepared location though. Lots of risk of foreign object damage to the engines. And logistically more difficult for refueling/rearming. Much better to use it on short but prepared strips.
For many businesses the situation is that technology has dramatically underperformed in doing the most basic tasks. Millions of people are working around things like defective ERP systems. A modest improvement in productivity in building basic apps could push us past a threshold. It makes it possible for millions more people to construct crazy excel formulas. It makes it possible to add a UI to a python script where before there was only a command line. And one piece of magic that works teliably can change an entire process. It lets you make a giant leap rather than an incremental change.
If we could make line of business crud apps work reliably, have usable document/email search, and have functional ERP that would dissolve millions of jobs.
I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
The bribes are looking much worse for overhead lines. Just giving people money (off their bill) for doing no work and making no real sacrifice. People will either be insulted by the low amount or insulted at the bribe. It will change no minds.
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.