double_nan

That is true, but for several generations the first (if not the only) law will be survival of the colony, hence extreme meritocracy. That is very appealing for very many ppl.

My take on why mars: there is no countries and no established laws maintained by existing societal structures. There is just no any other power other than the nature itself. Any colony on earth is doomed to be captured by a larger power sooner or later. I think in the eyes on ppl who are dreaming about Mars, nature is a weaker foe than other man.

Well, to be fair there is a quantum leap: an ability to materialize abstract thought presented as a text. This will end a lot of jobs where anyone can judge the result or certain error rate is tolerable. But while we have a lot of jobs like that, way to many are not like that and they will not be replaced. But i like the idea of a new type of UI (UX?) being born in front of us.

I would not feel bad. The jobs which will be diminished (but not totally gone) will be the jobs which require technical skills to execute. Illustrations for books would be a good example - technically hard job which doesn’t require any special imagination nor mental skills. Ppl will create illustrations by describing the desired outcome. But even in this example there will be outstanding illustrators who are famous for their work.

I have a name for this: ai whispers. In order to be efficient there will be a special dialect to talk to different implementations of AIs and ppl will specialize in different dialects.

It’s interesting how fast we will see open positions for AI whisperers: ppl who are proficient with certain text2whatever “AIs” to produce things which are made by relatively low skill workers now days

Taxes are due at vesting.

It took me some time to start understanding bazel properly. But after that using it is very easy and enjoyable (especially inside a monorepo). But learning curve is getting very steep very fast outside of simple BUILD rules.

Edit: enjoyable to a point that i half considering doing contracts for bazel based build systems.

An interesting point to view at any drug (including alcohol and even coffee) is presence of social stigmas. Coffee has very mild (almost none) social stigma associated with its consumption: ppl would recommend to drink less if you are obviously overconsume it. Alcohol has somewhat harsh social stigma starting from certain point and actually some encouragement in small doses. Cannabis seems like has no stigma (outside of some circles) in small doses and somewhat mild for overconsumption. No research, just my observation, but i would like to see one.

I feel that one of the problems of “bike urbanistas” is lack of utilitarianism. There is no realistic road map to make modern cities in the most of the world to look like Amsterdam/Copenhagen. That is my major problem with all this proposals. They try to see the problem in a vacuum and don’t take any real situations in to an account.

As for me, I wish it would be possible to choose bike to get to work (i have 5 of them already). But even with ideal conditions and electric bike i still live 15 miles/25km from work and the trip will take at least 1 hour. It rains and it snows from time to time here and there is no way that it would be possible to get rid of car infrastructure in any even the most idealistic dream.

By the rest of the world you mean Europe, right? Because outside of Europe it’s not really the case. Granted, i’ve not visited every country on earth, but in most cases i’ve seen “small livable downtown” is mostly an European thing. In other cases, you will need to take a looong ride home from the downtown (1h+).

So, HSR will have exactly the same issues as current airports right now: lack of transportation. So the main selling point of HSR (saving time) is diluted somewhat by a necessity to rent a car next to the train station. I’m wondering how many ppl will pick planes just because the traffic is better outside of downtown where all the train stations are.

I don’t know: San Jose - Seattle is ~900 miles or 1400km-1500km. That is 5-6 hours direct train at best at 300kmh. I don’t see this as something beneficial to a plane. Borderline comparable to flying and only because of slow TSA.

There is no good public transit even within bay area (where SFO and SJC are located). Without public transit HSR is close to useless. How HSR will make public transit to appear?

What exactly stops LA from having any working public transit in the first place? Why this _thing_ would not prevent LA from public transit with HSR as well?