301–310 of 1001 posts
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Democracy is a diversion technique honestly. “Rulers” are always a few people/corps and the fate of the people depends on them.
Honestly there's a big difference in the way people live in North Korea and Switzerland.
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Democracy is a diversion technique honestly. “Rulers” are always a few people/corps and the fate of the people depends on them.
The key is being able to throw the bums out every 4-8 years. This gives Democracy a self-correcting feature that doesn't work with lifetime rulers.
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I'm generally anti-patent, but if there were any valid case for patents, this is it. Long, hard labor to discover something entirely new that has massive uses for society. I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
I honestly can't comprehend how anyone wound think having a monopoly on a material is valid. They will make money without being the cartel of the superconducting sector.
For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…
Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
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Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping conta…
This reads like a list of technologies from the game civilization :)
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I have heard people much more knowledgeable than me say that measuring true zero resistance is actually quite difficult and takes some degree of specialized equipment, especially with such small samples. That may be part of it.
so none of the previous more esoteric superconductors were ever measure for zero resistance?
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It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Antibiotics Electricity Internal combustion engine Flight Li-Ion batteries Radio communication
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A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.
When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic about it than now when its inevitable transformative societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?
All of the "it floats" videos are unattributed leaks or come from less-than-reputable sources. The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample touching the magnet. From what I'm reading, several different types of materials can angle themselves like this from a magnet, but only Type II superconductors will float above a single monolithic magnet. Until we see a confirmed video from a reputable source of a vi…
So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"