It’s a systemic issue with Waymo and any all the taxi “disruptors.” Choices are made to put people in danger in order to extract profit by using cars AT ALL that is the problem, not who or what is operating them. Technology jesus isn’t going to save grandma.

Even in a full-communism-now utopia, the idea of compensating people for their creative endeavers and labor is still going to happen, that compensation will be indistinguishable from “money” as it is currently used.

Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.

You’ll never be able to find it or hear it though. The barrier to entry for AI music is so low, even lower then the “low-effort” artist you are deriding, that typical streaming sites will be inundated by it and nothing else will be found. The algorithm™ already prefers low-royalty music, and AI music will certainly have the lowest costs to play.

I don’t believe in imaginary property.

Rather then launching millions of tons of satellites, maybe the government could try regulating emissions? You know, remove cars, fossil fuel usage, create passenger rail etc? Improve society instead of doing literally the opposite?

Ooo A misanthrope, very original. Here is a cool org for you https://vhemt.org/

I’m not sure I trust the kind of person who was perfectly fine with robotaxi’s until an animal was killed. Seems they don’t’ really have a good grasp on the problems of a car-centric society of which road-kill is a very minor one.

Yea you seem to really hate birds and rodents.

The US produces a lot of chips, they just aren’t the consumer market leader. The US also prototypes the revolutionary new processes, i.e. 65nm-> 20nm -> …-> 5nm -> 3nm processes all started in the US. But once the process has been proofed, and it’s time for volume they send it to Israel or Taiwan to be mass produced because it’s cheaper and for no other reason.

Alright you’ve convinced me. The ability to store video’s within the app (for a non-technical user) is probably worth having an app. Of course a website could and should have the ability for a user to upload a video independent of an app, but I acknowledge that there are indeed some additional benefits that can only be realized with an app.

Of course I’ve never liked the wall-garden app store paradigm to begin with, and obviously if that wasn’t the only source of apps, then my entire point is moot. If any user could download the app from the digital ocean hosted iceblock website, and install it before going on scouting missions, then the app would be much more valuable, and the service more robust.

Yes. Hence my initial claim that apps are worthless, and shouldn’t be used if you can use a website instead. So the whole idea of Apple or Android being able to remove the “iceblock” app, shows that the app was ill-conceived to begin with. Or possibly it was even a honey-pot since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website.

Most apps are a packaged browser that makes proprietary API calls over https. However there is nothing proprietary or valuable in the app itself, except possibly some key material for authentication of the app with the back-end.

Then depending on the user making various requests a middle-ware program will interact with the backend database and retrieve the results back to the user. The database is the valuable part and other then the specific query the user is making, nothing else is can be retrieved by the user. Normally the middle ware isn’t even downloadable either.

A lot of websites have server side programs taht are never downloaded by the client. So there is a pretty big difference there. Basically if you want a subversive anti-government “app” you really want a website, not an app.

Apps are just browsers that can only visit one website. Who cares about them?

What we have isn’t close to enough for a single city, let alone the whole country!

It’s in every hydro dam that’s already built in between Arizona and New York. If we even do need more, there is plenty of land to use.

This is the key factor I’m talking about. There is not “plenty of land” for hydro storage, and flooding the amount of land required to provide grid level storage is an ecological disaster. Plus your analysis of mega-project like nuclear plants going over budget and over-time absolutely applies to any grid-level storage project you would need to go 100% solar/wind.

But just for fun, how much space would the grid level storage projects take up? I’ll let you use Hydro because it’s the best case scenario that exists today as far as energy density.

But beyond that what is your point, that humans shouldn’t build big projects, and any attempt to do so is “boneheaded?” Capitalism can’t build big projects I agree, but the problem isn’t the projects themselves it’s the profit-motive.

Do the math, how much grid-level storage do you need to power a city like chicago assuming zero baseload generation.

I can dismiss the the other solutions that are worse then pumped hydro because pumped hydro is actually the best case scenario for grid-level storage and it requires A LOT of space. Anything else, batteries, pneumatic mines etc etc are going to be worse in terms of space by orders of magnitude, not to mention the actual costs. Hand waving the need for grid-level storage by saying we would us hydro shows you don’t understand the scale of the problem.

That excerpt from that engineer is great, but WHERE IS THE STORAGE? Show it to me on a map. You can’t because it does not exist. New Nuclear plants are being built, finally, but there is a reason that no grid-level storage exists. It’s literally not possible today. There exists a pilot battery plant in Australia, and there exists a few megawatts of storage in Scotland, but these are few and far between and none of them are suitable for massive deployment.

You can use whatever moon-units you want. I prefer to use people-centric units.

Show it. Tell me where the grid-level storage exists for a city like Tokyo, or NYC, or Chicago, or Mexico City, or Paris, or London. Hell pick your own city, show me where it exists right now today.