321–330 of 557 posts
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Combine this with "but robots", and a somewhat small group of actual human beings will still be needed to do work. Combine that with the eugenics trend we're currently on, and, well, happy dreams.
> the eugenics trend we're currently on The what
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While I'm a big supporter of alternative digital networks, I think you're being much too pessimistic. We've known that humans can produce written junk; that's what tabloids were in the past. The problem is that humans haven't developed the culture yet to safely deal with this amount of digital noise. If you tried to breathlessly talk about why the world is ending due to a tabloid article you read, you used to be laug…
...tabloid article you read, you used to be laughed out of the room Only in certain circles. Keep in mind, those tabloids sold in large numbers and not everyone was reading them ironically or as SciFi.
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Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?
That’s not expensive. I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.
"until we develop a temperature-stable, cheap, broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine that is patent-free" "A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and wi…
FWIW he claims that was due to manufacturing concerns, specifically that only AstraZeneca would be able to be reliable and consistent enough to reproduce the related vaccine in a way that wouldn't cause potentially catastrophic adoption issues (vaccines actually killing people due to contaminants, etc.).
> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…
When seen in his "world in 10 years"-view, it absolutely makes sense. If someone plans to build a house and bought the plot, you can predict that he will have a house in 10 years with quite high confidence. All the people who are in their forties now will probably have quite expected lives in their fifties and most of them will probably still be alive. We can be quite sure of this. The world being in complete lockdow…
It absolutely makes sense to say the pandemic was not predictable in a given 10-20 year timeframe. The issue is if that is the standard he sets then many of his other predictions are also not predictable.
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there are a number of rural areas in the USA that politically show very low likelihood of getting something like a proper last mile broadband service built by wireline infrastructure any time soon (fiber and GPON or active ethernet). some rural counties in eastern WA are the exception.
Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements. Perhaps the price will come down as operators proliferate and this will be affordable for these communities. But I still fail to see how this is a game changer. Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower i…
Yes everything you've said about the possibilities is technically true, but it hasn't happened and there is no evidence it will happen. The RDOF has awarded another provider funding to bring fiber to within a few miles of my place but not directly to me.
Meanwhile I've been on Starlink since last February. I just checked and I'm getting 110M/12M with a 28ms ping time, which is 10x what I was getting for effectively the same price. Not only that, if I want to go on the road I can pack that little dish and take that bandwidth with me just about anywhere in the US. If I was broke I could pool funds with a few neighbors and we could split the cost.
With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?
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Combine this with "but robots", and a somewhat small group of actual human beings will still be needed to do work. Combine that with the eugenics trend we're currently on, and, well, happy dreams.
> the eugenics trend we're currently on The what
* The continuous drumbeat that the world would be better off if there were just fewer people
* The Tanton Group's influence on politics
* The rise of nationalism & authoritarianism (which inevitably leads to "the strong shall survive" eugenics movement)
* The debate about individual adjustment of healthcare payments based on fine-grained risk assessments.
None of these will (I hope?) result in the forced mass-sterilizations of the early 20th century eugenics movement, but these trends overall should give us at least pause. They are all centered on the belief that some people's lives are worth more than others.
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I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
This shift is already happening, look at property values over the last 1-2 years. My guess is that enough rich people moving into the middle of nowhere will cause the government to pay for terrestrial solutions ("incentivize") within the next 10 or so years.
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I don't think it's quite accurate to say the existing mRNA vaccines are not effective, because the rate of hospitalization and rate of ICU admissions per capita for double-vaccinated people, vs unvaccinated people is really clear. The data is showing that the likelihood of severe illness in a delta or omicron-infected person who previously had both doses of vaccine is significantly less. https://jamanetwork.com/journ…
Not ineffective, but far less effective than what was promised and expected. They're helpful, it's true.
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That's mute. Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.
Why would anyone want to block, rather than mute? I suppose it's more 'honest' in some ways but the implementation as described almost feels designed to create drama. Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?