91–100 of 105 posts
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Would you innovate or just play minecraft/guitar or read books about innovation but never innovate.
Some people would just play Minecraft, but a few would innovate, and the economic value of those innovations would be far greater than the economic value lost to the Minecraft players who quit their McJobs.
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People who will depend on UBI won't innovate. People who innovate don't need UBI. Slavery was expensive (guards, low productivity). In USSR Soviets realised that in Gulags it's more effective to pay Zeks regular salary and treat them as contractors than keep them as slave work force.
Early science in the Renaissance and later, until the 20th century, was almost entirely driven by people who could afford to pursue their efforts while sustained by income that required little or zero direct effort. Give humanity a chance. It might just surprise you.
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People who will depend on UBI won't innovate. People who innovate don't need UBI. Slavery was expensive (guards, low productivity). In USSR Soviets realised that in Gulags it's more effective to pay Zeks regular salary and treat them as contractors than keep them as slave work force.
Umm… I think you are deeply misguided on this. Earlier in life I created something that has generated a minimal stipend every month. That small security has enabled me to take risks, produce art, create technical processes, construct the water, power, data, and physical infrastructure for a private sustainable community, take a couple of years off to educate my children in technology, and, in short, prosper. It is li…
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It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Just a few missing pieces, probably a more rigorous scientific method and mathematics. Maybe some economic inventions too like the stock corporation to enable venture investing. I also wonder about the abolition of slavery. It was normal through pretty much all of human history up to the last 200 years or so. Why build machines at great scale when…
> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Bret Devereaux proposed that Industrial Revolution was due to a highly improbable coincidence of circumstances.[1] It all started with a steam engine, and very inefficient one at first[2]. But it had found it place, and then James Watt made the better engine and it also found its uses. It gave time for material science and thermodynamics to catch…
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> It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Bret Devereaux proposed that Industrial Revolution was due to a highly improbable coincidence of circumstances.[1] It all started with a steam engine, and very inefficient one at first[2]. But it had found it place, and then James Watt made the better engine and it also found its uses. It gave time for material science and thermodynamics to catch…
There's also the availability of coal. Coal was absolutely critical.
Of course we have solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear, but all of those are hard to access at any kind of scale without at the very least modern metallurgy and advanced materials made possible by fossil fuel energy. Modern renewable energy isn't possible without things like silicon PV, advanced materials for huge wind turbines, and batteries that are the product of extremely advanced materials science and manufacturing technology.
Fossil fuels were basically the thermodynamic seed capital.
It technically could have been done more slowly with wood and other biomass as a fuel and feedstock, but it seems like it would have been less likely to occur.
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It seems like the high ancient world was so close to industrializing. Just a few missing pieces, probably a more rigorous scientific method and mathematics. Maybe some economic inventions too like the stock corporation to enable venture investing. I also wonder about the abolition of slavery. It was normal through pretty much all of human history up to the last 200 years or so. Why build machines at great scale when…
>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor? Slaves weren't free. At least in the early United States, slaves were considered a significant investment; only rich plantation (land) owners could afford them. If they were cheap, then everyone would have had one. Here's an interesting article about the topic: https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php A typical slave in the US in the…
https://www.machinerypete.com/harvesting/combines
My point though was about the early days. There were no machines like that available, just slaves and animals. As long as there were slaves was there an incentive to develop this level of mechanization?
The paper [here]( https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07-HJJuly24-AOT... ) makes it clear that these researchers (whose main topic is gravitational waves) have used Bayesian analyses to estimate how likely different counts for holes present in the full calendar ring are. This is cool, but the bit about "techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime" is, well, making reference to Bayesian analysis.
Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places. Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the…
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There's also the availability of coal. Coal was absolutely critical.
Yet another thing to put in the bag of Fermi paradox answers: would industrialization and high technology be likely without fossil fuels? Of course we have solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear, but all of those are hard to access at any kind of scale without at the very least modern metallurgy and advanced materials made possible by fossil fuel energy. Modern renewable energy isn't possible without things like…
As well access to iron is required. And then eventually steel. All of this requires knowledge and writing and printing so that knowledge can be accumulated and propagated.
Late 18th century England and its colonies had access to all of these things. Coal, iron, printing presses, and universities. As well it had an political and economic structure that made risk-taking easy -- all the other prerequisites without risk-taking would still amount to the industrial revolution not happening.
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>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor? It's crazy that to some extent this is still true today. Automation could go a lot further with existing technologies and make many workers' lives easier or safer. But it is often cheaper to hire humans and burn through them instead of spending the money to implement new kinds of robotics. Especially when companies only think until the…
As someone who works in a robotics company, our biggest competition is minimum wage Latinos working in warehouses.
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This guy is re-creating using only materials available at the time: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
For anyone who's not familiar, "this guy" is Chris Budiselic of Clickspring, who's mentioned as an inspiration for this research: > In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism’s rings, known as the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete, however, it wasn’t clear how just how many holes were there originally. Initial ana…