In other words, it's Fahrenheit that doesn't make sense because it goes from arbitrary -20 C to 40 C. Even the originally targeted alignment with human body temperature to 96 F doesn't match.

On the other hand, freezing and boiling water makes sense, because you know that you have to drive carefully when the temperature is below 0 C.

I'll actually defend Fahrenheit more strongly than other US units. 32 degrees is a single number it's probably worth remembering. Balanced against that, environmental temperatures are usually going to be positive unless it's really fricking cold and the degrees are about twice as granular. The main advantage of Celsius is just that it's what's used in most places (and that it's tied in with metric units).

The absolute scale of Celsius (as opposed to the size of the degree) isn't the most useful anyway because you tend to use Kelvin for a lot of purposes.

My guess is that they make sure that you don't doubt your purchase. You could send it back if a competitor gets into your head. Additionally, if you don't doubt, you become loyal to the brand and you will recommend it in your network.

Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?

And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.

I don’t. There is the consideration that more money comes with more problems. You can say that more money would fix those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to spend energy thinking about it.

You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.

And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.

Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.

I agree. All I want is peace. Time with my family and friends, a garden, time to read, that kind of thing. Why anyone bothers with loud cars or big houses with huge lawns is beyond me.

I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day.

Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.

What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?

How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.

> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"

OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?

Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?

Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition. DenisM mentions status in his comment. Status will demand Versailles bigger than can be passed at light speed during a life, just to impress. There will be galaxies full of combat drones, just to keep the balance in fighting power.

I already have everything in the Universe outside your lightcone as my personal Versailles most remote wings, and you can't prove otherwise. My robots are on their way back and information about them will arrive with you approximately a second after you die, whenever that is.

See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.

> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"

Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.

What if it's not about keeping individual humans comfortable with nice experiences but about growing the amount of awareness? We think of humans as a resource problem but they are also the source of innovation and creativity. Will resources be limited if there is the chance to grow the number of aware beings to new heights with the potential to reach new levels of civilization?

They can choose for a year or two, but they will lose on scale. Apple can pull off their own processor because they are big enough. If companies don't sell in China, only Chinese companies are big enough to have fancy new components and production processes.

They’re not swimming in money because a thousand small independent newsrooms across the country, working independently, were no match for the massive VC-backed attention-stealing ad-revenue-sucking social networks coming out of Silicon Valley.

How do you continue once you are big enough to be a threat to Google?

From the article:

> they [the central banks] can expand the money supply to keep the system propped up.

They have to expand money supply to keep the value of the currencies stable as long as most money is not spent. The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money.

By which force do central banks have to keep increasing the money supply once people start spending? There is no reason to do so and thus no reason for fiat currencies to collapse.

It's more likely that they increase interest rates when people start spending again, and thus reduce supply and as a consequence, keep the value of money stable.

> The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money.

The supply of money is adjusted to match how much is needed, it's the entire reason why countries switched to fiat currencies. Everything else being equal, if the GDP is growing 5% each year you need 5% more money each year to keep the same velocity of money i.e. how much is being used in the economy.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp

This is open source: https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/

You could organize some crowd funding to expand it to the feature set you need.

>what looks to be one

If it quacks like a duck, is it already a duck?

What is bitcoin's value anchor? What happens if all the people who are afraid of regular currency collapses have spent their money on bitcoin? Who will provide the liquidity to drive the demand that keeps the value high?

When the covid crisis is over and people want to invest their bitcoins into new opportunities, won't we see a huge crash because there is no money available for all the bitcoins that are supposed to be liquidated?