purplelobster

Not a huge loss for the US, but I will probably never go back due to this. Even if you have insurace, your life will be hell for a while due to having to fight your insurance company over a tremendous bill. I don't want to have to think twice if I should bring in my son to the hospital or not, and frankly, the US doesn't have anything unique enough to offer to offset that risk. I'm also doing my best to stay away from conferences, preferring instead Canada, European or Asian destinations.

Perhaps people with addictive tendencies are less likely to become, and stay rich.

That's a very good analogy. Just don't underestimate how quickly the tech can progress in this day and age, I did that mistake myself. Less than two years ago I was very excited about the Rift and bought a dev kit. As someone who works in computer vision etc, I was convinced though that good tracking would be many years out, and then suddenly there were the lighthouse solution from Valve. Now I've had the same thought about inside-out tracking (by means of vision), but even that seems to be arriving much faster than I initially anticipated. Today every big tech company from MS, Google, Facebook, to Valve, and hardware companies such as Samsung, HTC and Nvidia/ATI manufacturers are pushing hard on every frontier of VR. I agree the form factor has to change to allow mass adoption, but expect much faster progress than what happened with phones in the 80s.

Wii and Kinect sucked because they tried translating predefined motions to button-presses, with no added benefit over pressing that button on a controller. And they weren't particularly good at it. You don't see how VR is different, have you even tried the Vive?

For the record I was hugely bearish on the Wii, Kinect, 3D tv and movies, and rightly so. But there is no question in my mind that VR will be huge.

They have a powerful authoritarian regime run by engineers. In cases where there is a need to act quickly and decisively, that is an advantage. No need to convince the public (which in this case is already on board).

I'm not sure those number take into account all the stuff that China is manufacturing for the US, that is not consumed locally. Yes, that CO2 is released in China but it's paid for by USD.

Exactly. services -> art, entertainment, pewdiepie, e-sports?

Of course there might be new occupations around the corner, but given that most of every material and cultural need is already satisfied, except for eternal life, I don't see what occupations billions of people could transition to that people or businesses would pay money for.

Maybe because the average American pollutes 10 times more than a Chinese

Keep moving the goal posts huh? This is literally science fiction (HAL9000).

The fact that we're even talking about "Discover Weekly" means it's a huge success. That it doesn't work for everybody is another matter.

I'd say Google was hard tech

Wouldn't a better formula be the expected value of the outcome: utility delta * #people * probability of success?

Another view is: I could definitely invest especially the forced pension better myself. The problem is most people would use that money for consumption if they had a choice, and then at old age they would blame society for having to live on the street (and in the end probably get a handout anyway). Perhaps in the end all of us are better off if we "force" these saving for most people.