I admit to invoking the phrase “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” at least once a year when something feels like it’s going horribly wrong.
> Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.
There is literally an infinite amount of work to be done. being 1,000% more efficient doesn't change that.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
> Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
In the markets were housing costs are out of control, it's mostly down to legal and political bans on construction, not so much cost of construction itself.
It's perfectly possible for people who want to spend less of their life working to do that. It's true that if you want to work the same number of total weeks, but fewer hours per week that constraints what jobs you can take; but it's straightforward to retire early on a modest nest egg: you don't even need to tell your employer that this is what you are planning to do.
In principle modern conveniences like Uber make it more possible for more people in more industries to decide how many hours they want to work. But there are substantial political barriers to widening these models.
> Health care is already insanely expensive.
It's fairly cheap where I live, even though wages are some of the highest in the world here in Singapore.
Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
> Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
I suspect even a 20% cut in total comp isn't going to cut it (for most jobs). That's because up to a point there's economics of scale in working hours. Ie in many jobs you need to spend a certain amount of time each week just trying to stay in touch with everything else that's happening, but once you paid that cost every extra hour is pure benefit in terms of productivity---up until the point you work so much that you see diminishing returns. But eg going from 30 to 31 hours per week is productive more productive than going from 0 to 1 hour.
However, I didn't even have in mind cutting the amount of hours you work every week. You can make use of the extra productivity and real pay you get these by eg retiring early and then live in modest circumstances. Or you could take sabbaticals every so often. All while still working 40 hour work weeks, when you actually work.
This is what economists in the very early 1900s thought that increasing industrial efficiency would eventually lead to. Ie. that we'd all work maybe a day or two per week or less.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
Ironic that everyone talking shit about "building killing machines" probably also has Ukraine flags next to their PFPs. How you think Ukraine fighting their war right now fam - with sticks and bottle rockets?
I work in the defense industry. I have a personal philosophy that I will never work on a platform that could be used to directly or even indirectly harm an individual person (like a fighter jet radar system). So far I've been able to stick to it. While I do think offensive weapons are a necessary part of life in these times, I don't want any of my work going towards building them. Of course some of the profit I help my company make likely goes towards developing new offensive weapons, my taxes will always fund my government's purchase and use of these weapons no matter who I work for.
There's perhaps another war going on right now that's a bit less popular, and a lot more profitable, that these guys are making bank on. I hope you sleep well knowing you support this team
Some people really sincerely do believe in pacifism. That doesn't seem misaligned with 'the victim of an immoral war should win'.
One can also believe multiple things at the same time, like:
* Waging war is immoral
* If someone wages war on you, it's acceptable to defend yourself instead of allow them to kill you
* Enabling war for personal profit (by selling weapons) is immoral
* Making weapons for self-defense is acceptable
i.e. during WW2, many countries repurposed existing industry in order to build all the weapons that were needed to win the war. That's a very different thing from spinning up a new startup with the stated goal of making weapons to sell for money. You can personally think it's okay but it seems totally reasonable to me that someone would believe "weapons should not be manufactured for personal profit the way we manufacture toys or food".
So you want a bombed out shell of a country to repurpose a destroyed industrial base and ramp up manufacturing for a technology it has no history of producing. Very logical.
To some extent Ukraine has also given people are very distorted impression of what a modern war in other contexts would look like, adding an unhelpful data point to the other outdated one which is WW2.
WW2 was probably the last time you could fight a war, and do things like convert your local industry to produce weapons and tanks that were relevant. And even then, it only really happened because the US mainland was not contested territory during the conflict - it had the luxury of choosing when to enter the war.
Ukraine is simply not a "normal" looking modern conventional war. Both sides have receiving significant external imports which are various reasons are mostly untouchable by kinetic strikes till they cross the relevant borders (in this way it is much more like Vietnam in logistical respects). So you see assumptions like "mass production of drones will be key to the future!" in a context where the bulk of the critical components - microprocessors, cameras etc. - are not produced in the countries in conflict, and are imported from factories which are in no danger of ever being directly targeted.
So cheap mass producable systems have held the line in areas, but they're obviously drop ins for something you'd prefer to use instead - i.e. artillery - but there's a shortage of that. But conversely they haven't moved the line in a lot of areas - some of the biggest strikes of the war have been from conventional exploitation of defensive failures - i.e. the Kharkiv breakthrough, or from espionage operations which might be notable for using a lot of drones but the real accomplishment was getting them in position and the real success was still very typical: Operation Spidersweb taking out a large number of Russian long range strategic bombers.
Now people will point to the latter and say "see! strategic bombers are useless!" ... and yet that can hardly be true if a substantial operation to destroy strategic bombers was worth doing. A system being vulnerable in a way it previously wasn't does not make it ineffective (i.e. if strategic bombers at airfields intact would endanger the Ukranian position, then they're still an obviously necessary system, but they now need better protection then they had - or Russian counter-espionage just sucks).
This company was founded by a MAGA psycho in the neo-fascist Thiel circle, and you can be sure that their technology will be used domestically as soon as it’s politically viable.
You know, America had to coerce Ukraine into disarmament in 1994 because they had too many killing machines. You'd be surprised how quickly national defense becomes a touchy subject, on both sides of the aisle.
America has, for decades, has been trying to bilk Ukraine into forgoing free Soviet surplus to buy NATO-standardized equipment, only to remotely disable their material while they're using it. Because America was so fickle in providing defense, we've guaranteed that all future peace treaties (eg. one in Ukraine) necessitates direct American intervention, and not vague "security" agreements. That's probably why Trump is brooding over his options right now instead of arranging a ceasefire - he can't get peace without trading away something absurd like US naval assets or direct satellite intel.
I just explained it to you and you ignored my comment. Here is a simplification if it helps:
1991-1994: They nuke Moscow.
1994-present day: American strategic deterrence takes over.
If any part of that is unclear to you then I urge that you reread the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances and return to the discussion with the rest of the context.
Anduril does not manufacture strategic deterrents. If you think they're the solution to the Budapest Memorandum then you're the sort of armchair YouTube General that the Army filters out in officer school. It's not hard to understand, anyone can Google the difference between strategy and tactics.
Ukraine keeping the nukes was never going to happen. The US, EU, and Russia were all in agreement on that. Ukraine was in shambles at the time, and no one wanted the risk of nukes getting transferred or sold outside of the existing nuclear club.
Ukraine had physical possession of the nukes, but their ability to actually use them was highly suspect. They might have been able to circumvent the security measures given enough time, but if anything such an attempt would have sparked an international "peacekeeping operation" to make sure the nukes didn't fall into the wrong hands.
Well, for all the wanting of nonproliferation it didn't stop Pakistan or India. I never saw any peacekeeping operations from China or Russia when either of them went nuclear.
If Ukraine had the physics package, why couldn't they deploy it? Barring launch codes from the Kremlin, there's still enriched uranium in the warhead that you can turn into a simpler one-stage bomb. I doubt they could have gone thermonuclear, but simply leveraging the ICBMs and fissile material seems well within Ukraine's wheelhouse.
> We report detection of CN emission and also detect numerous Ni I lines while Fe I remains undetected, potentially implying efficiently released gas-phase Ni.
Where does it say there is zero iron? This is an upper bound, not zero.
"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."
Do you blame the blacksmith for making of a knife? I haven't worked on facial recognition or AI but I have made peace with the fact that some things are so dual-usage that you have to accept that it will be used for both good and evil. Just look at cryptography for one. There is no such thing as 'encryption which works only for the good guys'. Just like there is no thing as a 'working gun which does not harm the innocent'.
The 'do nothing and don't advance' option is just an illusion. Because in actuality what happens is "Only the worst people get the option.". Life isn't very kind to those attempting moral purity unfortunately. There is a reason 'worldly' and 'morally pragmatic' are synonymous.
If you want to reduce harm, if possible countermeasures are probably the best you can do. It varies by specific technology. Depending upon the tech this may ironically involve working with the very thing you are trying to weaken. Or it may be something completely different, say working in materials science instead of ballistics.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. An Osprey doesn’t have a “forward firing weapon” because Direct Action Penetrators followed by -47s from the 160th are better suited to such a scenario.
On the topic of USAF security forces training to fight Spetsnaz…lol.
I figured it was real. Now I get to read about them. :) Thanks!
The US actually did strap people to the sides of helicopters for medevac at one point. The TV show MASH showed one of them. (And yes, the Bell 47 was real.)
