431–440 of 692 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Faced with a choice between beef or fake beef that tastes exactly the same, most people will just go for the real beef. They don't want the highly processed fake stuff that contains who knows what. The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.
Even within a much smaller price margin, there'd still be plenty of reasons to make kill-free meat the default preference. Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers. There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as op…
What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.
https://torinrittenberg.com/writing/looking-back-and-ahead-o...
The global debt crisis and intractable US entitlements will lead to a global depression. China will promote a new cryptocurrency to compete directly with the failing dollar. The US and allies will attempt to use their massive military to defend the dollar. China will not have sufficient military might be so will lean on other countries in particular Russia with their nuclear arsenal. World War III will be sold on sup…
So, I have a problem with a large number of these points. Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read. I think Fred is way off here. The bullet points: 1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way h…
Edit: perhaps coal would be phased out, without government intervention to save it. I don't think oil production would go down on its own.
There’s about 50-60% of the US population, and 2/3 of the US economy, that are very much eager to do business with the rest of the world. They are concentrated in urban areas, and thus have issues in the political process, but it’s enough clout that I wouldn’t make hard predictions about US isolationism in the 2020s.
I too dream of a decentralized internet and especially decentralized cloud resources, but I can't find a way around the question of how you securely host a database on some random person's idle computer/"spot instance". If that data is compromised, who do you sue? The random person who has no assets? Data security ultimately depends on secure physical access to the hosting hardware. Not everything can or should be pu…
Multiple clients sync to/from a server. Server syncs with other servers. Part of the sync with clients is a list of all servers so clients can cycle servers until sync succeeds. Eventual consistency. I'm doing this with a small dataset now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, yeah, being against those in power isn't a good idea in authoritarian regimes. At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. Being taken care of as long as you do as your told isn't all bad and probably was the default state of the smaller communities in the past. Whish we would find ways to achieve this without the authoritarian aspects.
>At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_attempts_and_victims_of... People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree.…
Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.
Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.