141–150 of 425 posts
I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.
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Not having a representative vote in parliament was kind of annoying, but what do I know
Nitpick & a tangent, but: Being properly represented in a democratic system is not the same as being able to vote for someone.
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What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
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My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.
I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized device with countless exabytes of computational power projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there would…
Plus, I'd imagine "the ENIAC guys" would quickly realize all the things that were computationally infeasible in their time had more or less been done along the way to modern computers.
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Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
There's still a difference between the stores having meat on their shelves and the stores having every kind of meat on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind of drink, every kind of cheese as well.
More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…
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That's like saying you don't like American beer because you tried Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite and didn't like any of them. There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.
> There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US. Ghirardelli are decent, but I've been relatively hard-pressed to find decent American chocolatiers otherwise. In general, European chocolatiers are in a different league.
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There is a video where it literally blows the mind of an immigrant from Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8
Literally literally, or metaphorically literally?
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Except in a parallel world where we continued forward making advances in space we could already be a defacto post-scarcity species (as far as materials are concerned at least), exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon - simultaneously helping create an atmosphere there, while avoiding any climate impact here, have effectively infinite land to expand outward into, countless high paying jobs perpetua…
>exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.
Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.
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Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.