> The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
Global warming will not reforest the planet with a substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
It depends; not everything that's newer is automatically better.
Web and websites did the heavy lifting of instant and world-wide information sharing.
With social media, open or closed, there are many non-obvious tradeoffs; I am not sure whether on the whole, we are better off with or without them - time will tell
They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter
A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.
What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
This (socalled "luxury space communism") is impossible insofar as a good lifestyle includes positional goods and social status. Demand is infinite, even your own demand, and you have to be able to outrun it.
The best technology I know for this is Ozempic. If there was a way to ban yourself from getting loans that would also help, but you wouldn't like it.
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project
You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.
> Malaria
Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
> Social safety nets
Not a science breakthrough
> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch
I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.
Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.
This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.
Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.
That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.
[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!
[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.
Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
To add to your examples, Neil Tyson wrote a book entitled “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_to_War)
> The book chronicles war and the use of space as a weapon going as far back as before the Ancient Greeks. [It] includes examples such as Christopher Columbus' use of his knowledge of a lunar eclipse, and the use of satellite intelligence by the United States during the Gulf War.
Much more science than people tend to realize is military-funded.
automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:
That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.
Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
well since the revolution in question is one where the company you're working for becomes attendant to its employees' dignity, I imagine you would keep working the same job under a new CEO and board (the old ones being forced out by the revolution), but you would enjoy it a lot more and feel much more inspired to keep doing good work....
I think they'd find that to be an engaging task, and they'd get a great deal of satisfaction once they had sorted it out themselves.
If the mice had to deal with an intermittently disappearing cursor, and erratic hover behaviour on a 2 year old M2 Mac with the latest version of Sequoia .. that would probably illicit a very different response.
This is that depression the comment author is talking about. Apple fans will make it a point to lash out at Linux for not being a trillion dollar company supported product. Only depressed people lash out at the parts of the world where communities are trying their best.
Yeah. I had a laptop which is only 4 years old causing issues, took it to an Apple Store and they couldn't give a toss.
Everything was pushing me in the direction of buying a new laptop (with a small discount relative to the new price) and transferring everything across.
One 5 minute delivery spot is as good as many regular parking spots since it won't be taken up by long term parkers. You could probably eliminate 90% of parking spots and turn the other 10% to 5 minute spots and it would be easier for delivery drivers than the status qou
I agree. And on top of that it would be great to have spots with ALPRs that delivery companies can pay for their use and discourage or tow non-compliant vehicles.
Covid time encouraged new food pickup priority parking spots but I don't see a lot of new thinking around emergent street use needs. We have massively increased delivery culture and micro mobility shares and city planning is lagging. (I think delivery is great - fewer car trips and just overall more efficient - my opinion).
Why should roads, walkways, and construction sites be blocked just to let someone have more time to avoid a ticket? I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck summons. It's a fair shot for both.
I totally agree with you on that, but then why have this program at first place then?
I'm just saying that given its SFMTA -- if the tow truck will take say 30 min, they will probably try to wait and issue the ticket later right before tow truck can arrive so that they can get the fines. SFMTA relies heavily on fining people for their revenue and hence incentivized to not act on good faith here. Obviously, it an accusation based on anecdotes and personal experience and by no means an evidence, and I may very well be wrong, but overall I've very very little faith in SFMTA.
>> I imagine the text goes out from SF's servers simultaneously with the tow truck. These systems are often old. I wouldn't assume anything here.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?