quonn

Explain?

Can an uber (eats) delivery really be an order of magnitude more expensive and still be viable? Same for Airbnbs, which already cost 30-50% of a hotel.

However I agree that the gig economy artificially distorts the employment statistics by creating jobs that should, perhaps, not exist at all. A significantly increased unemployment rate might have a real impact on politics.

Yes: to specialists that have typically another 5 years of formal education on top. They do not refer patients for relatively trivial topics covered in the first year of a bachelor‘s degree.

> Auth is a solved problem by minds much smarter than my own.

Imagine a doctor making such statement about their field of work. Do you have a degree?

> MBA types too, although they tend to think the solution always comes down to

treating everything as a market or something to be solved with a market mechanism

What you like to call an economic "war" is simply policy.

Whether the policy is "There should be no barriers when trading with China" or it is "There should be many barriers when trading with China" - either way, decades from now. Will it have been worth it?

Right, but intelligence/smarts and consciousness are not the same.

We know for a fact that for humans consciousness only exists in parts of the brain and can be turned off using drugs, sleep and accidents.

It is almost certainly the same for all animals with a brain.

Given the fact that plants have no brain it is a reasonable assumption they have no consciousness. It may be wrong, but given all evidence it is, so far, the best assumption.

We usually call assumptions based on our best current understanding scientific facts.

I‘m sure it‘s factual and common, but it‘s tone-deaf given the slide deck title.

It will not matter less and less because China can and will satisfy that demand themselves without relying on American products. So far the US exports about half as much to China compared to the exports to the EU (2022). And it will likely export less to China in the future.

India is not even close to replacing the huge European middle class and even if it were it has proven to be a highly unreliable partner. And so far the US exports to India are not even 15% of what is exported to the EU (2022).

The EU middle class comprises around 280 million people. Almost as many as the whole US population. And it is culturally and politically aligned with the US to a large extent. It‘s a huge market to loose.

Nobody would drop 15-20% of their exports to try to save 5% of their defense budget all while loosing influence and power.

This always went both ways with the EU providing a market. When the US stops to provide defense, watch and see the EU reaction, starting with all things digital.

Literally on the second slide: "I’ve done engineering since the turn of the century, and led small teams and biggish orgs."

If that is not navel-gazing or humble bragging, what is?

But Google came years late. I used multiple search engines before Google finally emerged as a winner. altavista, excite, hotbot and others; there was a huge hype around the Lycos IPO and then alltheweb was a thing for a time and then Google won.

So being first does not necessarily mean winning.

And Twitter had strong network effects.

Maybe they changed their mind on it in the last 10 years. I had as the source a high-ranking BMW manager as well as an Audi one who each gave a public lecture at a university with such a statement.

> not being able to drive the car

I had plenty of recalls and it never happened even once that I could not drive the car before the recall.

It‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.

How is he within scope? At best he might have contributed to advancing engineering science, but is that really the case? Has he not rather merely financed engineering science and perhaps not even engineering science but just engineering practice?

> Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water

That‘s a surprisingly small amount of water. Just a typical shower uses 150 liters and all it does is keeping you clean for a day. On the other hand a cotton shirt can last many years.

Are you saying the water is lost or destroyed or permanently polluted? This is, of course, not the case either.

> What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far.

No it isn‘t.

About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

And for those we have viable solutions that either do not lower subjective quality of living or even improve it, but they are not sufficiently implemented by enough people.

Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.

We should first address the things that we have viable solutions for instead of loosing public support by insisting on reducing emissions in areas where there are no good solutions yet and some sort of asceticism seems to be in order.

That is balanced by not having to heat.

The more likely explanation for the first two is that plenty of fossil fuels are available so they are used inefficiently.

It‘s only slavery if those beings have emotions and can suffer mentally and do not want to be slaves. Why would any of that be true?

Wouldn't that just be lying to people?

Most of the measures you suggested, especially straight up give people money will just increase inflation further.

Rewriting probably even more risky. In my experience the kind of change that is needed to make the function testable rarely introduces bugs. Rewriting the function will likely introduce bugs, especially if bugfixes have been done on the original function before.

> I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.

I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.

On other words, the product can just return control to the user at the moment when there is a problem, so they don‘t take responsibility.

> Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?)

Any evidence for that? I predict the exact opposite. The price of energy will rise.

How is this food for thought? OpenAI had an unfair advantage by starting out as a non-profit.

AC equipment is replaced at the end of its lifetime and picked up by professionals. That's a fact.

And as I pointed out, even if it wouldn't be picked up and leak _completely_, then it would still be 50x less than the average car owner emits in the same timeframe.

Even a single season of heating a house with natural gas already emits more than a complete leak. And who is loosing sleep about that? Maybe those who install an AC for a 20x emission reduction. Not those baselessly claiming that AC are environmentally problematic.

Please provide a source for this wild claim. Nothing winds up outside, unless it leaks. The gas can and does get reused indefinitely.

Additionally and just to put it in perspective, a typical AC Split-Setup contains around 1kg of R32 which would be equivalent to 677 kg of CO2 _if_ it would leak completely over the 20 years of usage (which it doesn‘t). That‘s equivalent of the CO2 contained in 285 liters of gasoline or about driving 3000 kilometers by car (for cars using 7-8 liters). The expected leakage is 1-3 percent. So that‘s around 30 kilometers by car per year.

In reality, modern ACs are widely used for heating in winter (I am doing this myself) and help to reduce CO2 emissions compared to heating with oil or gas.

edit: I had to edit this twice. Actually the first estimate was correct.