If you like this, strongly recommend you check out the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. They have everything you can imagine. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
The combination of wealth concentration, inflation, unaffordable education and health care, and the annihilation of entry-level knowledge work due to AI has created a crisis that really needs to be better appreciated by the few people that control most of the world’s capital. The society we live in can only exist if most of us buy into the social contract. If it appears to the overwhelming majority that the social contract no longer applies, then this story won’t end well for anyone, superwealthy included.
> this story won’t end well for anyone, superwealthy included
I think they believe they’ll be fine. And I tend to agree.
In the French Revolution—before private jets and wire transfers—most of the aristocracy escaped. It’s even debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos. (We can reject that they materially lost it.)
I think some figure they will die before any negative consequences hits them. And the hardliners are actively working on changing that social contract, where you will have no choice but to comply, because you will have no power. Many dictatorships still live on, in one form or another, with the elite doing just fine.
it's pretty scary to think that your last bastion of improving your self in this world (your mind) might get taken away too - then we'll essentially have fixed positions where capital owners and their offspring are perpetually the only ones allowed to make money.
Yes, sadly. My discussions with tech people outside the US indicate that the rest of the world is learning to route around the US. The damage is more or less permanent at this point.
One can argue that CDC was obliviously dead by the early 70s.
Incompatible, increasingly archaic platforms, the best of those optimal for batch Fortran number crunching, counter to industry growth/interest. Organizational metastasis with a next gen platform (Cyber 180 as Star was stillborn - CISC from hell as 2nd system(s) syndrome) only at the end of the decade. Standards, coupled with profound organizational incompetence, ground it to dust. They made really good OEM disk drives for a while but sold the business off to fund their continuing failures.
There really needs to be a history that’s not an encomium to William Norris, Philosopher King of CDC.
I suspect this is old news for you, but just in case you haven't heard of it, check out Feynman's Lectures on Computation. A surprising amount of the book is still relevant, and it's fun how much he always brings everything back to the physics.
Obligatory shout out to Morris and Kaashoek's class at MIT - they update the reading list every year, and it's always great: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/
I partially agree, but this doesn’t totally address the range issue. There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.
> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.
Not really anymore, at least not as far as places people regularly need to drive for personal reasons. I'm not saying you can't find people for whom an EV isn't a practical option, I don't even have to look outside of my inner suburban neighborhood to find those, but just like in my neighborhood the majority of people even living in the rural west would have no problem having an EV as a daily because they can charge at home.
Most people aren't driving 200+ miles every day or constantly towing things even if they live and work in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that they can install a fuel station that has little to no operating cost basically anywhere that has a good view of the sky offers advantages of its own.
> There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker
Where? I live in Wyoming. The folks who have EVs around me are doing fine–there aren't many public chargers on a square-mile basis, but there aren't many places the public is randomly going. If you're travelling on a highway, you're passing chargers about half as regularly as you're passing gas stations.
My next vehicle will be an EV. (I'm waiting for non-Tesla self driving to get a bit better.)
Population-wise that's a rounding error, and very few people routinely take 500+ mile road trips without ever encountering a rest stop or town large enough to warrant a charger.
Perhaps there are some farm workers left who would like some additional range, but they can always throw an extra battery pack or two in the cargo bed, Cybertruck-style.
There will always be people who aren't perfectly served by the currently-available options. We shouldn't let the outliers dominate the conversation when the existing options are sufficient for the vast majority.
The western states are fairly well served by interstates, and all the interstates are now well served by chargers. Obviously there are routes that don't use interstates that aren't served, but in the continental US there is no spot that is more than 150 miles from a charger, and very few that are more than 50.
True, but as an EV driver I feel more comfortable when there are a couple of chargers available in an area — I run into too many chargers which aren’t working to enjoy relying on a single option.
This is literally the only reason I have a J3400 adapter, as much as I hate the idea of giving money to a Musk company we have to admit that Tesla are one of only two companies installing charging stations that has an incentive to maximize coverage instead of profitability (the other being Rivian who is largely targeting off-highway areas ignored by the other networks).
Yes the Chinese have better infrastructure. Probably even better technology out in production available to them at this point. But so what? I mean it's great for the rest of the world. And that's awesome. But how are we plebes in the US ever gonna get access to those vehicles?
It's not as simple an issue as people make it out to be here in the US.
But yes. Good on Europe and China for pushing these technologies forward.
We keep expecting for-profit organizations to behave as governments. And this is an especially easy sell in the US, where government has been vilified for decades as part of a long propaganda game run by those who wish to privatize and steal those things which should rightfully exist in the public domain. But for-profit organizations, by design, will never ever ever behave in the public interest, and it’s foolish to expect otherwise. This is not a criticism of the author; this is a criticism of ICANN, and the subcontracting of governance.
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