It benefits those with lots of debt but really hurts those that have worked hard to build up savings, or are on fixed income.
780 karma · joined October 27, 2017
Solar cell prices have decreased by 300x over the last 40 years and continue to do so. Similarly, solar production capacity and installations have increased very significantly.
There are also more electric car companies and models than ever before.
Over the last 20 years, humans have really mastered cooperation on a global rather than a national scale. IMO, the economy as a whole has expanded as a result.
I've seen multiple ICs with more power than their direct manager. They are basically immune to being fired because higher-level leaders understand their value and respect their track record.
At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere?
How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
No one will care about a Lunar space station, it's not enough of a step forward to capture the public's attention. It's sad that NASA's 'futuristic' new proposal is to do half of what we were able to do 50 years ago. People will quickly vote to cut funding for it, and maybe they should.
Maybe only House of Cards. HBO just has Netflix beat in terms of content over the last couple years especially.
It's a tough question as they may just be redirecting money away from charities with less marketing spend.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.
.. by no means an optimal antivirus program, but in a sense, it is effective.
If we can replace some of the cars with scooters it should be a net gain for citizens.
What do you do in cases like that if prison is off the table?
From your own link, only 25% were born / grew up in King county.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a more efficient competitor to undercut this company :D
It will require inventions and new technologies to successfully mine the asteroid, and those will give society access to vast new resources.
The transferring of bitcoin is not what is energy intensive. The energy is expended as a "vote" on which of many possible forks should be trusted. Gold definitely has this expenditure as well, military's are often required to secure it, and large amounts of energy and expenditure are required to discover and mine it.
USD is one of the most stable currencies in the world, and the fed has done a good job of maintaining stability. You're right that Bitcoin is no where near as stable as USD, but it is more stable than the currencies of some other countries. There are still ways for a central bank to maintain interest rates even if Bitcoin is widely used. Bitcoin does not prevent fractional reserve banking.
In terms of reducing governmental control, sure this isn't much of a problem if your government is altruistic. Governments do not have a great long-term track record here. In Venezuela for example, many would say Bitcoin is solving a very real problem. You're right about its ability to be used for illegal activities, however the same could be said for most technology: encryption, the internet.
In terms of energy, this can be a criticism of almost all currencies and stores of value. This real-world expenditure is much of what gives it value, especially early on. Gold is valuable because of the difficulty in mining/acquiring it. Even national currencies are valuable due to the resources committed by their military, or the military's of that nation's allies. People might argue it is GDP, but GDP does not mean much if you cannot defend it.
Manipulation and price swings are a valid concern, but no other currency is immune to those either. Silver for example has had very widespread manipulation in the past. Silver and gold have probably still been a net-positive.
If the idea of losing access to some data is the "most grotesque and awful thing" the author can imagine, I suggest the author read some more imaginative books.
The best strategy is probably what many large distros like Ubuntu have adopted: designate only a few long term support (LTS) versions, and commit to supporting only those versions.
Much of human memory evolved to remember locations, and almost all of the top memory competitors use locality association ("Memory Palace"/loci) as their primary method.
You are correct that longitudinal stability is applicable and important for most aircraft, but that is due to angle of attack and lift forces. Neither of which apply in a vacuum.
Suppliers may not be using 100% fakes, making them much harder to catch. Customers may also be a significant part of the problem, due to Amazon's return policy. Customers can easily claim a fake, then ship a fake item back, blaming the supplier.
There's no way to know for sure without Amazon themselves testing the products, which would be costly. Most items do not have unique serial numbers, and even if they did, opening boxes to confirm matching serial numbers would likely be cost prohibitive.