Funny thing is, no matter how you arrange to do that it becomes a de-facto death ray. Stick a terawatt of solar panels in space, use the power to shine a laser/maser down to earth, then build a station to turn the laser power back to electricity? Great, until some hacker figures out how to control where the laser is pointed. Then you get Dr. Evil holding the world for ransom.
Thanks for the correction. I remembered seeing that number but didn’t analyze it in any depth. A more detailed analysis of the market, by Freddie Mac, concluded that there were four main drivers for the recent surge in prices, and investors weren’t on the list.
Institutional investors apparently even reduced their purchases in 23 - some of them were even net sellers - because of prices and interest rates. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still villians in this scenario. I don’t think big investors should own single family homes at all. But still they aren’t as big a force as my previous comment indicated.
In support of your argument.
Report: 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023
edit: see corrections below
“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” Stephen Covey
Surprised I haven’t seen Quantum Break in here. It’s a pretty good shooter with some magic powers thrown in for fun. You don’t get much say in the story, but it still kept my interest all the way through. And it has an interesting take on time travel, woven into the story quite well. It was made by Remedy Entertainment, before Control but after Alan Wake. Also I liked how they cast real actors in the game and made them recognizable. I picked out Courtney Hope in the game from seeing her in Control, even though her character is different in QB.
He’s referring to the fact that the Effective Altruism / Less Wrong crowd seems to be focused almost entirely on preventing an AI apocalypse at some point in the future, and they use a lot of obscure math and logic to explain why it’s much more important than dealing with war, homelessness, climate change, or any of the other issues that are causing actual humans to suffer today or are 100% certain to cause suffering in the near future.
As a kid, probably Lode Runner. It ran on my pc. Some arcade games were fun. I enjoyed Asteroids. Colossal Cave, and the Infocom games like Planetfall were fun too. Though what really hooked me was Doom. It was the first real 3d FPS game and it blew my mind. It’s been my favorite genre ever since.
It pays to watch ad-free videos or else it gets the hose again.
dang, cosmology is weird. I went to reply about the big bang, the age of the universe, and how it can’t be infinite, but instead decided to look it up. I really don’t understand this stuff.
I’ve struggled with this for my whole life (and I’m not young) but haven’t succeeded in developing my willpower much at all. I think it’s just part of your ‘personality’. In quotes because you can change your personality somewhat with therapy or other growth techniques, but it takes a lot of work and there is no guarantee it will happen.
That said, I do use commitment devices to substitute for willpower sometimes. One that works for me is to join a class or group for exercise or other things. In my case it has worked for meditation, exercise, martial arts, and others. I find that when I wake up and feel like ‘I just want to lie around and play video games all day’ I then remind myself ‘the folks at the group will notice I’m gone, I’ll have to explain it, and It would feel better to just attend’. And so I get my exercise. Usually. If my brain can convince me I’m not feeling well I still skip out sometimes.
Just finished Breathedge. Subnautica in space? Sort of, but with a ‘ha, aren’t we game developers funny’ kind of humor. Portal is an immersive game that’s really funny. The humor in Breathedge, however, insures you can never really settle in to the game. Even so, It’s most impressive what such a small team was able to accomplish.
Just started Plague Tale: Innocence. Stealth survival with hordes of rats - a little creepy and I’m not really expecting an uplifting ending, but we’ll see how it goes.
Things like Impossible Burgers, absolutely. I tried one once and it was so much like an actual meat burger it grossed me out. But I will make a seitan corned beef to put in a Reuben sandwich just because it’s an awesome sandwich.
Which is an issue if those artists want to copyright their work. So far the US has maintained that AI generated art is not subject to copyright protection.
Enshittification in action.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
It’s funny to see this comment downvoted so heavily (-14 at the time). I wonder if it’s disagreement or just “I don’t like that idea”…
The simple facts are we’ve dumped over 2 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. A bit over half has been absorbed by the oceans. We have no realistic way of removing it. And combined with other GHGs it’s driving an unstoppable global warming. We can talk about reducing emissions and renewables. But even if we stopped all emissions today, it still wouldn’t be enough to prevent the global average temperature from continuing to increase.
(attempting to answer the question instead of shaming the questioner)
It might have helped solve the problem if we did it 50 or 60 years ago, along with global EMP strikes to disable all the vehicles and industrial equipment, and a global commitment to return to an agrarian low-energy lifestyle. And if you prioritized the most highly industrialized cities that produce the greatest carbon per capita. But the sad truth is that, right now, it’s already too late. We have already released so much carbon into the atmosphere that we are more or less guaranteed to see 4 degrees C above pre-industrial. And if you aren’t already retired you will probably see it in your lifetime. Along the way that triggers a series of cascading feedback loops which, all-told, will likely take the planet to about 10C above pre-industrial. We continue to release something like 40 billion metric tons per year. And the best CCS facility we have, in Iceland, can sequester about 4,000 tons per year. We are racing toward the cliff with the throttle at full speed and no corrupt government scientist is going to take away my truck or make me eat bugs.
And questions about who should die, who should be killed, and such don’t even really matter now. They sound immoral, but if the projections are right it looks like all of us who aren’t already old are going to die from climate change anyways. So pontificating on things that aren’t ever going to happen is just academic onanism.