It's absolutely the worst place to be in any sort of crisis though, whether it's war, pandemic, rioting, natural disaster.
So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.
And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)
In the abstract we have to pick one crisis or the other, but the real world is messy. Global warming has momentum, and so does population despite what look like reliable projections of population decline in many places. In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
Demographic momentum means population continues to increase for a while after the total fertility rate drops well below replacement. Once the decline starts the momentum works in the opposite direction: decline continues for a while even if TFR is somehow increased again.
Not a single year has our population dropped.
We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
> Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
That'll only be feasible for so long, since birth rates are dropping pretty much everywhere.
Not really. If economic activity with a material basis increases faster than the reproduction rate decreases, you'll still see an overall increase in resource extraction.
People can do very scary things with a knife, a car, or petrol+matches.
We don't try to regulate those things out of existence like we do with new technology (drones and now 3D printers)
Kind of ridiculous that a country with more guns than people and 45k firearms deaths per year wants to regulate 3D printed plastic. Yet collecting and shooting actual guns is still an acceptable hobby in many states.
The same states that want to regulate 3d printers and force you to register them and install only software that will prevent you from printing anything that even looks like a gun part are also the same states that have been trying (or succeeding) in enforcing those same sorts of broad and dubious regulations on firearms too. When you think of states whose legislatures think collecting and shooting guns is an acceptable hobby, California and New York don’t exactly top the list.
3D printers have absolutely no clue about what it is that they are printing. They just receive X, Y and Z coordinates, temperature settings and extruder feed rates.
Just like an injection molding machine doesn't care about what the shape of the mold is. Just like a lathe doesn't have any restrictions on what you can make as long as it fits the chuck and the tooling.
Oh, I totally agree. I always see this as evidence that the terrorism threat is overblown, if it were really as large as we are led to believe the number of successful attacks would be far higher than it is.
Also wouldn't it only work for aircraft that are flying away from the launcher? IR & light signatures are much weaker from the front. At best I think this guidance system would only be economical for ground-based launchers, as the cost of aircraft and their limited payloads mean you want the most effective weapons onboard, not the cheapest.
Annoyingly, I can't find any information online about such a simple guidance system. The earliest homing missile fielded by the Soviets was the K-13[1], which used technology reversed-engineered from the AIM-9 Sidewinder[2]. Later systems seem to be improvements upon that technology, not simplifications.
To me it feels that the age verfication (adult de-anonymisation) push, at least in Europe, is coming more from the increasingly-authoritarian left as a reaction to the rise of the online right and Musk's Twitter.
(Maybe some unspoken element of concern over social media bots, too - as they evolve from spamming copy+pasted comments to being near-indistinguisable from actual human accounts?)
In the UK we have many people on the left with these perspectives. It comes from the second-wave feminist tradition.
But generally speaking, online age verification is one of those issues where the left-right ideological divide doesn't map neatly. People support and oppose it for various different reasons. Much like the assisted suicide issue.
Age verification efforts in the US have been privacy-attacking (demanding government ID) whereas the system being proposed in europe is privacy-preserving (zero-knowledge proof).
It would be interesting to see a similar lobbying breakdown for the EU and UK. I bet it's still Meta with other right wing actors. The left rarely has the money for this kind of lobbying scale
WFH was great to begin with, but as somebody living alone, the isolation starts to have an effect after a while when you're 'working alone' too
And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
> And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?
Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
> Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.
That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.
I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)
Yeah, I was spoiled by my college town. Libraries open until 2AM, a 24 hour space for students. Even a few cafes downtown open 24 hours a day. Suburb life is mostly fine, but that's one thing I miss most.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.
And maybe we can pool them a bit by profession, because they often need the same tools and can help each other. Any maybe they can even work on some of the same projects, so we can remove meetings.
HN people always try to do this cute rhetorical gesture where you take a thing and say "hmm nice idea what if we called it <thing that already exists>", but they like this joke so much they get baited into doing it in dumb ways like this one.
A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.
Some of the classic 80s themes, like Space and Castle, primarily used regular bricks of reasonable sizes in a very limited palette of colours, with a few special parts unique to the theme. They were much more suited to taking apart and building your own creations.
These days, there's just too many specialised and small parts, and too many colours. Even if you buy a big grey Star Wars set, you'll find that the internal structure is often brightly coloured to make the instructions clearer - but this isn't ideal if you want to take it apart and build something else.
If you like City, Lego has you covered, even now (cue the old jokes about Lego City having 500 police stations, 400 fire stations, 20 gas stations, and no shops and no houses).
The other themes of old have been replaced by movie tie-ins, and it's hard to build a pirate world out of Pirates of the Caribbean sets
Classic Technic was brilliant, but when they switched to 'studless Technic' it became far more difficult to build creatively with it (even if it enabled far more intricate builds with complex mechanisms, like the gearboxes in the supercar sets) - there was no natural 'up' direction any more, and building anything became more of a 3D logic puzzle than just building with bricks.
Real shame that they discontinued Mindstorms, though.
I recall but can't find that there was a red technic car built with studs before the panels/studless took over - that thing didn't look terribly realistic but it DID look like lego.
The difference in the instructions between classic and modern sets is interesting too, instructions for both the main and alternate build in just 38 pages. Compared to the modern instructions, which often add just a couple of parts per page.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.
And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)
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