marksbrown

Vacuum is the ideal. Taking the molar mass of air at 28.8g/mol at STP we can see a density of air at about 1.225 kg per metre cubed. Combined with the volume of the bag we have the uplift. We quickly find that empty flexible bags collapse with nothing to provide an atmosphere of pressure back out thus the compromise of low mass gasses. These still add weight to our vessel diminishing our carrying capacity.

Therefore the best solution is hot hydrogen.

Holographic projection using spatial light modulators (SLMs) is unfortunately a dead end due to cost and complexity of manufacturing. There was a Cambridge startup a decade ago called 'light blue optics' (who have a promotional video narrated by Stephen Fry somewhere in the depths of the internet).

I don't think the technology ever got past military HUD for fighter pilots.

I do think that holographic projection is a feasible technology but it'll require a cheap method of introducing phase to thousands of pixels reliably. The computation requirements to generate the holograms is certainly something that can only become cheaper over time.

In some places with expensive unreliable public transport, the quickest & cheapest way (a group) into town was by taxi. Minicab to precise. The five minutes away for 45 minutes variety. The cancel without any notice. The sorry I don't take card mate. How about the ones who got hopelessly lost to charge you more?

The old way was awful and Uber got a hell of a first mover advantage.

How big should the world economy be before we can feed, clothe and house everyone?

The logic behind the successful earning more has the flipside that the unsuccessful deserve to earn less. As a society we've decided that all people should have access to asset-based wealth. In a sane world this wouldn't be an issue. In this one, it's led to price fixing, government corruption and inescapable poverty. Housing is not a free market. And yet we treat it is as such.

Until governments shift taxation from income to wealth this increasingly unfair world will continue to punish those who cannot keep up.

I particularly enjoyed www.every-layout.dev

I'd like a way of automatically filtering for websites that :

* Don't use JS * Don't use Google analytics * Don't weigh more than a few kB per page * Don't show any sites with ads

That would be a place to begin.

FYI this is exactly what the hashbangs in DDG do!

Relevant : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Disco Elysium

Perhaps consider a steel man instead of a straw one. Socialist institutions that cover natural monopolies save the state money simply by economies of scale. I'll grant not all industry could or should be nationalised but certainly healthcare in the US is a prime example of market failure.

A bit glib but : https://xkcd.com/1227/

I don't doubt we all look at younger people and worry about the future. I'm going to assume it's part of getting older.

Similarly of course, you're describing the eternal September [1] which itself is a rather dated reference at this point!

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Think? Know! Cramming works in the short term due to the nature of mass testing.

Any sensible person identifies what they will be judged upon and maximises their effort towards that. Especially if we're in a world of credentialism. Which we are.

Current peltier chips are barely a few percent efficient, break easily and require high temperature differentials. They're used in stove-top fans and RTGs. The latter should be Sterling engines to be ignorant mind. I don't doubt there are some interesting things to be accomplished by shaping the flow of heat conduction but I sincerely doubt it'll be energy generation directly. Thermodynamics isn't something you can just ignore!

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

Ivan illich

If general relativity is an accurate model of gravity then distortions in space-time are caused by mass. Traveling at the speed of light can be shown to require an infinite amount of energy to accomplish for a finite mass. However space-time itself could, according to our current understanding, travel faster than the speed of light.

So if you could 'warp' space around you rather than travel through it, you could go at an arbitrary speed. Unfortunately warping space-time is typically accomplished by large amounts of mass. Hence a large amount of energy. If I remember correctly it also requires we bend space in a way we have never seen nor have any reason to believe is possible to accomplish beyond it being allowed by general relativity. It's quite a pickle.

Without such a device humanity will still populate the galaxy but it'll take hundreds of millions of years. Assuming we don't wipe ourselves out.

Anything critical of the failure that is the United States, it's crumbling democracy or the Frank insanity inflicted upon the world by the psychopaths operating out of silicon valley. Unbridled Capitalism of the American variety is cruel and big tech is complicit in propagating antidemocratic efforts through walled gardens and mass tailored propaganda. How's that?

‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up' -- Thomas Edison.

Precisely. Articles such as this, without metastudy to back up spurious claims, are the horoscopes of the modern age! Project your own culture upon it and espouse the 'correct' creed.

Precisely. Due to the pandemic we now know two things in the UK. First that there are 9 times as many homeless as stats claim and second that all people can be housed. This is due to the fact that this was accomplished during the first lockdown. There just has to be political will.

Naturally you paint a few million floating balls and throw them into the ocean!

You mean this website has been shutdown? https://www.bbc.co.uk/food

Radix Positional notation is just one way to represent numbers. A way that is better for arithmetic than arbitrary numerals certainly. However it's important to remember that alternatives give us a comparison. A way of seeing implicit detail. Who knows, maybe someone will invent a better notation one day, and those future humans will look back and wonder why we didn't see the obvious solution!

Other numeral systems existed before the Roman. Etruscan for instance.

We need a functioning Carbon trading/tax regime. I don't care if does something useless with a computer, that's literally most people, I care that we don't make people pay the price of their insanity.

They're trying to determine their own ignorance. It's a useful thing to do not not necessarily a useful thing to publish. Personal branding is one reason to publish this.

Nobody dragged the US into the middle East. Why is there anything to do beyond acting as honest broker diplomatically?

Jack of all trades, master of none but sometimes better than one.

Aren't those things equivalent?

I'm never a fan of the reductionist philosophy that there is only one true map to the territory. Simplest map to the territory perhaps.