saintgimp

The article uses the word "organic" in a highly technical manner, meaning chemical compounds that contain carbon, and of course we already know that space is filled with that sort of thing. It does NOT mean "organic" in the casual sense of originating from something alive.

Although to be fair, dust is definitely a problem if you want to see into the center of the galaxy which is why most of the observations of Sagittarius A* are done in the infrared or near-infrared spectrum, which can penetrate dust. It's also why we can't see clear across our galaxy to make out what's beyond it, so we don't know what the Great Attractor is.

The "lump of labor fallacy" isn't really relevant here because we're not talking about work going away. We're talking about the usefulness of human labor as a means of production going away. No, not entirely, but enough that our economic system as it currently exists will fail and we'll need a new one of some sort.

You know the old illustration about the buggy-whip makers complaining that automobiles were destroying their jobs and putting them out of work, and how could anyone possibly survive that? Then, oh look, there were tons of new jobs created in automobile factories and everyone was better off than before.

Well, in that story, we're not the buggy-whip makers any more; we're the horses. Horses didn't move on to better and more productive forms of transportation employment. They simply became useless except in a few remaining highly-specialized working roles, or as pets. Or glue.

The word "job" as used here is a technical term. It doesn't mean "anything that needs doing". It doesn't mean "anything I find enjoyable or worthwhile". It actually means "activities that someone will pay me money to do because I can do it better, faster, or cheaper than anyone or anything else, including machines." (For the purpose of this discussion there's also an implied meaning of "someone will pay me enough money for those activities that I can purchase adequate food, shelter, and discretionary items so as to have a reasonably comfortable existence.") That set of activities appears to have peaked in per-capita terms and is probably on a decline which will accelerate rapidly in the future.

So yeah, you're right that this problem is inherently an economic problem, not an "I don't know what to do with all my free time" problem. That doesn't make the problem any less urgent or less difficult to solve. It's actually incredibly difficult to solve because it'll involve rejiggering our social contracts, which will probably take several generations to complete.

Actually, a lot of California is going to turn into some sort of desert. There are several borderline ecosystems that used to support mature trees but once we lost them to disease or fire no trees of any kind appear to be growing back; just chaparral.

Yes, Life (capital L) moves on, but perhaps not the kind of life that we'd prefer. We can just shrug and say, "Oh well" or we can take a moment to reflect on what, if anything, we might do to steer natural selection in directions we find more pleasant.

No, he's saying that "merit" is an incredibly easily-gamed metric. We can measure results all right, and we can measure ability rather less so, but "merit" implies a casual link between ability and results that is very hard to unambiguously prove and shockingly easy to fake (even if just by disregarding beneficial external factors).

Um - in this case we're saving the internet (well, really radio spectrum that people use to access the internet) from private corporations, not the government. A totally free market sucks because there will never be a properly-maintained commons. If it weren't for the government, maybe I'd bolt my router to a 10-kilowatt transmitter so I can get my home wifi signal while I'm grocery shopping. So what if it sucks for everyone else! The government quite rightly regulates me in that area and says I can't do that.

If the internet as we know it today ever dies, I'm 80% sure it will be due to private corporations screwing everyone to make an extra buck, not due to government over-regulation.

As far as I know, no one (not even the investors) has claimed to have seen a working prototype deliver significant power to a cell phone.

That's the point. It's likely that at the time, she honestly didn't know the difference (or didn't understand the difference well enough to realize that it would be obvious to other people). She did a Ted Talk where she bragged about how she didn't know anything about engineering when she started uBeam.

Seems like they need to do the hardware equivalent of a "git bisect" here. Instead of fiddling around with the current version of the device, trying to figure out if the observed effect is actually propulsion or just an artifact, someone should start tearing the thing apart, testing as they go, and find out at what point the observed effect goes away. That would probably be instructive.

And I think at some point the customers are going to figure out that the startup merry-go-round is and never was intended for their benefit. Over time it's going to get harder for new startups to attract customers because people will realize that flashy new product offerings aren't likely to stick around (in a form that we actually want) for long.

I've lived in Seattle for 20 years and the only earthquake I've ever actually felt here was the Nisqually quake in 2001. Contrast that with some parts of Japan where you feel quakes on a monthly basis or more.

There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water in Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.