My take on why mars: there is no countries and no established laws maintained by existing societal structures. There is just no any other power other than the nature itself. Any colony on earth is doomed to be captured by a larger power sooner or later. I think in the eyes on ppl who are dreaming about Mars, nature is a weaker foe than other man.
I think as soon as people are moving to Mars, you'd at a minimum at least need some kind of commonly agreed-to standard around land ownership. I.e. maybe each new settlement implicitly owns all the land in a twenty mile radius. If you want to settle closer than that to an existing settlement, that's fine as long you can work out an agreement with the original colony.
That is true, but for several generations the first (if not the only) law will be survival of the colony, hence extreme meritocracy. That is very appealing for very many ppl.
I would not feel bad. The jobs which will be diminished (but not totally gone) will be the jobs which require technical skills to execute. Illustrations for books would be a good example - technically hard job which doesn’t require any special imagination nor mental skills. Ppl will create illustrations by describing the desired outcome. But even in this example there will be outstanding illustrators who are famous for their work.
I have a name for this: ai whispers. In order to be efficient there will be a special dialect to talk to different implementations of AIs and ppl will specialize in different dialects.
This is just what was just called “speaking tech” back in the early 2000. I see a lot of discussion online about “prompt engineers” or “ai whispers” as you put, but I think the reality is that these tools are just another UI paradigm that our current generation will (on the whole) struggle with and the next generation will find intuitive.
Well, to be fair there is a quantum leap: an ability to materialize abstract thought presented as a text. This will end a lot of jobs where anyone can judge the result or certain error rate is tolerable. But while we have a lot of jobs like that, way to many are not like that and they will not be replaced. But i like the idea of a new type of UI (UX?) being born in front of us.
It’s interesting how fast we will see open positions for AI whisperers: ppl who are proficient with certain text2whatever “AIs” to produce things which are made by relatively low skill workers now days
The taxes can also be due when you receive your options. That can depend on if you purchase your options or if they are granted to you and entitle you to a discount.
YMMV but an NQSO purchase agreement can be your friend.
It took me some time to start understanding bazel properly. But after that using it is very easy and enjoyable (especially inside a monorepo). But learning curve is getting very steep very fast outside of simple BUILD rules.
Edit: enjoyable to a point that i half considering doing contracts for bazel based build systems.
An interesting point to view at any drug (including alcohol and even coffee) is presence of social stigmas.
Coffee has very mild (almost none) social stigma associated with its consumption: ppl would recommend to drink less if you are obviously overconsume it.
Alcohol has somewhat harsh social stigma starting from certain point and actually some encouragement in small doses.
Cannabis seems like has no stigma (outside of some circles) in small doses and somewhat mild for overconsumption.
No research, just my observation, but i would like to see one.
I feel that one of the problems of “bike urbanistas” is lack of utilitarianism. There is no realistic road map to make modern cities in the most of the world to look like Amsterdam/Copenhagen. That is my major problem with all this proposals. They try to see the problem in a vacuum and don’t take any real situations in to an account.
As for me, I wish it would be possible to choose bike to get to work (i have 5 of them already). But even with ideal conditions and electric bike i still live 15 miles/25km from work and the trip will take at least 1 hour. It rains and it snows from time to time here and there is no way that it would be possible to get rid of car infrastructure in any even the most idealistic dream.
25 KM is a decent ride but definitely doable and even if people would only do it 50% of the time (and let's be honest, if people in Stockholm chose to bike during the winter months we can probably up that 50% a bit) that would still be a huge reduction in traffic, freeing up valuable city space for more productive endeavors.
I live in Philadelphia and it’s absolutely feasible here. Our density is roughly comparable to European cities like Amsterdam. The vast majority of trips are under 3 miles. With a few relatively small tweaks we could be an excellent bike city.
I don’t know: San Jose - Seattle is ~900 miles or 1400km-1500km. That is 5-6 hours direct train at best at 300kmh. I don’t see this as something beneficial to a plane. Borderline comparable to flying and only because of slow TSA.
~5h is how long a train takes from Warsaw to Berlin, compared to ~1h by plane (~2-3h including getting to and from airport), and I know multiple people who still prefer the train - even when they are able to easily afford any mode of transportation.
With the train, you have way more freedom in choosing the time and the hour. You have multiple trains leaving during the day, and you can choose 30 min before needing to hop onto one. Also, if you miss one, you just wait for the next one.
Also, on the train you can work, relax and stretch your legs or eat freely. So it doesn't feel like lost time really. Planes often do, even if you travel business.
SeaTac is out in the middle of nowhere and easily one of the most unpleasant airports I've ever flown out of. Last time I had to go through immigration at SEA there was vomit smeared all over the floor.
Meanwhile the Amtrak station in Seattle is centrally located, about fifteen minutes to downtown by tram. The Amtrak station in Portland is pretty much right in the middle of downtown. I don't know that I'd want to go from the Bay Area to Seattle on a train, but something like Portland to Seattle would benefit greatly from HSR (currently it's about a 4 hour trip).
There are plans for HSR between Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR. Washington state just allocated a few hundred million to advance design. I think they are waiting for some matching federal grants before proceeding. I think they are hoping for a high speed line within 10 years or something.
I actually think that if the High Speed line is built all the way south to Eugene it kind of makes sense to build a traditional electrified rail way between Eugene and Redding CA. through Medford, and a higher speed line to Sacramento where it could interline with California High-Speed Rail to LA. Connecting Medford with Redding and Eugene with a traditional rail should be worth it on its own, but with the surrounding high speed lines it becomes possible to operate a west coast sleeper between Seattle and LA in like 10-13 hours (as opposed to the current 36 hours).
150 000 people live in the Medford urban area. There are popular tourist activities close by. This stop would serve both the locals in the Medford area and tourists alike. In fact it could really help Medford’s economy as the drive from Seattle or San Francisco is intense, it would enable tourists to take an easy train ride there and rent a car for further tourist activities (or simply take the bus to Ashland for some hot springs or a Shakespeare play).
But more importantly though, this portion is very mountainous, making finding a high speed alignment without unrealistic amount of tunneling impossible. A traditional electrified train with speeds up to 120 MPH is far more likely to actually happen, and would do plenty to enrich the area as well as provide an alternative to flying between the Pacific North West and California.
You’re really missing the point. These places are remote and neglected. Meth is a symptom. Connect them to jobs and opportunity and we can develop thriving communities along the rail corridor. That’s where midwest and west coast cities originated in the first place.
King Street Station is a fifteen minute walk from “downtown”. It’s basically in downtown already and by light rail is one stop to the first “downtown” stop at University Street. It’s more like 4 minutes by train. They come every 10 minutes so that’s 15 minutes worst case.
The same light rail will take you anywhere from the airport in the south to the northern edge of the city. Within a decade it will go as far south as Tacoma. In a couple years a new connecting line will reach Bellevue. Eventually as far as Redmond (Microsoft). My own neighborhood of West Seattle will connect in 2035.
The future is bright for the west coast. If HSR connects us all this will be the most desirable place on Earth.
That's roughly the same time as Paris-Nice, which is a very heavily used high speed rail corridor. Not enough to make the plane route unviable like it did with Paris-Lyon and Paris-Bordeaux, but there are drastically less planes now, so it's still a massive net win.
There is no good public transit even within bay area (where SFO and SJC are located). Without public transit HSR is close to useless. How HSR will make public transit to appear?
