Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to say "We don't discriminate in our hiring, positively or negatively" and follows through on it could probably pick up talented engineers who are otherwise being filtered out of the hiring process due to their skin color / gender.
This is my general feeling as well. People enjoy catastrophizing, and also fail to appreciate that we as a species are actually fairly good at solving problems.
I agree but we’re also very good at making new problems and destroying the nature around us. I wonder how many species dissapeared due to modern humans’ way of life and needs. We’re so good at it that we won’t stop till there’s nothing else left to destroy.
I think that’s a fair argument about the past, but the last 200 years are so incredibly different than the 6000 before them I don’t know that it will hold.
I think the most likely future is one where we do mostly nothing for a long time, until things get quite bad, and then one nation or a small group of nations does some kind of solar geoengineering to very quickly lower the temperature of the Earth. Mostly this takes the form of pumping aerosols in to the atmosphere to block out some percentage of sunlight. As far as I understand it we already have the technology to pull this off, and it's not so expensive (tens of billions per year) that a single very rich nation couldn't bear the cost themselves.
At the very least, I can't imagine a nation like China or India or the US staring down a relatively imminent existential climate change threat and not at least trying geoengineering. At that point what do you have to lose?
Agreed. When things get bad, there's going to huge pressure on politicians to do something, and at that point there's probably not going to be any good answers. Geoengineering is risky, especially if it's rushed, but it's within the means of many of the countries that will be worst affected by climate change. Even if it has a very low chance of working and a high chance of worsening the situation for everyone, I'm sure at least one political leader is going to pull the trigger when they've got an angry mob beating down their door demanding action.
I'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.
It doesn’t. I appreciate that the author wants to tackle big themes, but there was so much hand-waiving and wishful thinking about how people want to live and choose to live that it really undermined the plausibility of the plot.
I did appreciate some details, like the idea of airships for long distance leisure travel and large swaths of land being returned to wilderness. But overall it didn’t live up to the hype.
Having read a number of KSR books, I admire the creativity, but find some ideas a bit half-baked. The characters and storytelling are generally a bit lacking in depth and development as well.
Consider reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow if you haven't. Excellent book - I haven't read the one you're talking about but from what you mention I think it deals in similar themes
That's disappointing. I had similar issues with The Mars Trilogy. I've yet to finish the last book, and the middle book took a long time to slog through.
HAG Capisco. I think a big detriment to many chairs is that you end up in one position and never move. The Capisco seems to encourage a lot of fidgeting around, in a good way.
They verified via brainwaves that he was in the REM stage of sleep. I don't really know anything about brainwaves, but this seems like the kind of thing that's fairly definitive.
Govt's adoption of technology seems to lag society as a whole. What I wonder about is, is the lag a steady 20 years behind for example, or is it that the pace of adoption is just slower, which would imply that the lag (or gap between technological adoption in govt and society as a whole) is getting bigger and bigger.
Is Earth going to be at war with the planet state of Mars, in the great water wars of 2150, and the Earth forces VA department is still processing injury claims on paper?
I have to assume that VA department you're talking about is Dept of Veterans Affairs - and if that's the case, you're in luck! You don't have to wait till 2150 for this to happen.
I know that we no longer process injury claims on paper probably since 2014 or so.
Most of the paperwork filed are shipped, scanned, and processed into digitized forms into a system of record known as Veterans Benefit Management System (VBMS) here at the VA. VA Regional Office staffers can then pull the digital records for further processing.
I supported the VBMS team's effort in migrating to a cloud based environment in 2017/2018 and my team help start the Caseflow/Appeals project, a system used to track appeals cases - which relies on VBMS daily. Caseflow is open source as well.
You see change in a government department only when the old guard retires or gets restructured out. Any new technology has to wait until the proponents of the old technology are gone.
Assuming this is all true, it still just feels like they're picking winners, which is probably the thing that's going to matter more than anything else going forward. People can and will point to a laundry list of rules violations by institutional investors (is a 140% short of a stock completely and unambiguously within the rules?) that show the hypocrisy of the little guy getting screwed.
They aren't picking winners, they are avoiding lawsuits for allowing illegal activity on their platform. Short squeezes are illegal. You can see people collaborating all over WSB to create short squeezes, most frequently using the Robinhood app.
You keep repeating that short squeezes are illegal but that's not true. Manipulating prices to cause a short squeeze is illegal, but that's not what happened here. Some people bought GME because they liked the stock. Others bought because they thought a short squeeze was coming.
If I think the price is going up and buy, that's legal. If I manipulate the price to go up after I buy, that's illegal. It's the same thing.
