aalleavitch

The degree to which science has advanced since the Webb project started can't be understated either. We have a fundamentally better understanding of the technology available and what we even want to look at. Much better to simply move onto the next project, of which there are currently very many.

What if he's not a genius and actually he's just some guy, and his wealth is actually arbitrary.

Absolutely chilling thought, eh?

Those are both things you can just hire someone else to do.

The only two things that matter for success in entrepreneurship are who you know and who you decide to trust. Both knowledge and attitude only matter insofar as they influence those two things.

We're closer than you'd think. Chlorophyll is only something like 28% efficient at absorbing sunlight, we have experimental solar panels pushing 45%. Collecting wavelengths the plants don't use and then lighting them only in wavelengths they do use has a significant potential for efficiency gains, though we're not quite there yet...

Yes, soil, temperature, and weather control are huge, as is the lack of need for pesticides. Hard to over-state how much controlled environments can improve yields and crop quality and reduce costs of maintenance (in return for large initial capital investment).

I'm not sure you actually understand how legitimately scared we all are.

A great way to get rid of outrage culture, btw, would be to get rid of all the systems generating the outrage.

This is not a one-in-a-million event, this is not something that no one could've predicted, many people predicted it and we blithely ignored them. This is the direct consequence of our consistent policies and behavior. This is like standing 99 feet from a cliff and saying "well the next 100 feet in front of me is 99% solid ground and 1% air, sounds safe to me!" and then walking right off of the cliff.

> Well, this was a one in a million thing. Nobody could have predicted the world to just shut down for six months, and it's not productive to plan for it.

This is the most shocking hubris I've witnessed in a long time.

> And taking on debt to do it isn't inherently irresponsible. In fact, it's just a wise financial decision when interest rates are low. New revenue streams aren't required to be generated -- it's just shifting a subset of future revenue to the present.

I don't know how someone could possibly make this statement RIGHT NOW of all times? How many businesses are sitting on the edge of folding right now? Whoops! Looks like all that future revenue didn't show up! Guess who's going to suffer for these decisions? Not the investors, they sold out! How about all the employees who just had all the blood sucked out of their job security and future livelihood?

In what sense are investors in this scenario not just hostile parasites? At least if it were dividends then the investors would have any sort of remaining long-term interest in the success of the company, and not just how they can most quickly disentangle themselves from taking any responsibility for the survival of the company that they ostensibly had ownership over by gulping down revenue it didn't even generate yet? In what sense is the investor not crippling the company and leaving it weaker than they found it? It's vampirism! Just because the money is there for the taking doesn't mean you should, it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't irresponsible and even morally reprehensible.

You create a nightmarescape of shambling zombie companies just waiting for a global pandemic to remind them that they're all already dead. Enjoy your artificially juiced stock value after it craters because our entire economy is short of legs to stand on.

> If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog?

This statement is worse than wrong; it's nonsense.

Even if you come up for some very specific metric of intelligence that you think is valid (which will always involve the use of some limited test constrained by subjective considerations) you're still wrong! Not every single Border Collie will perform better than every single English Bulldog, at best you will find some consistent comparison between averages, which is absurdly far from the same thing.

Centralization is great, isn't it?