I agree with your take. The power vacuum would be incredible. In my country, I’ve seen a political party completely collapse from infighting after its charismatic leader was assassinated.

It might be more about energising the base to turn out rather than swaying the undecided voters at this point.

Wojak is a polish word that means something like “soldier” or “fighter.” Wojak images generally intend to convey someone in great pain, but dealing with it.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalists would abolish this rule immediately and exploit everyone to work 5 jobs simultaneously.

I don’t know what hotels you go to but my experience has been pretty mid across most of Europe. Bog-standard continental breakfast buffets. Croissants, orange juice, cereal, toast, all of mediocre quality.

Not terrible as it is, but you can likely get infinitely better breakfast by hopping over to any cafe across the street.

You could bring them to Mars and burn them there. Thicken up the atmosphere a bit, maybe add some water.

That 2% includes forgetting to use one, running out and being too horny to abstain, and various other excuses for why you’re not wearing one when you’ve agreed beforehand that you would.

Not so. The 98% figure assumes correct use of the condom every time. In the real world where people are imperfect, condoms are only about 87% effective.

Maybe. On the other hand, changing out your candidate after one debate doesn’t inspire much confidence. And you lose the advantage a sitting president usually has in elections.

A new candidate might indeed do better, but the DNC is risk averse as hell. I don’t see them having the balls to make a move like this.

It kinda sounds like you’re standing ready to assassinate the democratic candidate and you’re just waiting for my approval to pull the trigger. What exactly is your point?

I mean yeah, most of the people that hang out here didn’t want him to be the candidate to begin with. But that has little to do with who you’d vote for given these options.

Yeah I agree I hate this kind of obstructive customer service

I work as a software engineer on automated customer service systems like these, and boy let me tell you, obstruction is the name of the game. For example: don’t make the phone number too easy to find on the website because it will lead to too many calls. We nudge people toward the FAQ and such first so they can hopefully find their answer there. Then, we have chatbots like this which contain exactly the same information as the FAQ again. And only then might we offer you contact with a human.

The essential problem is that support is a cost center, so cost savings is the name of the game. We optimize for metrics like:

• “deflection” (number of calls averted because we pushed the user into automated tools instead)
• “first call resolution” (percentage of issues resolved in one contact. How do we know if your issue is resolved? Simple, if you don’t contact us again we assume the issue is fixed)
• “Average contact time” (pretty obvious, get the customer off the phone ASAP)

If you manage to get on text chat with a human, typically they are handling two other conversations at the same time, that’s why they seem so absent all the time (and why companies love chat. Much cheaper than calling).

I’m not saying we’re all diabolical here. There is a general agreement among everyone in the industry that we should help the customer as well as we possibly can. Indeed every CS manager will tell you how important we are to our brand image and NPS, how we strive to be the most customer-friendly company etc. etc.

But the numbers don’t lie. If you look at the metrics that everyone actually optimizes for, it’s cost cost cost.

The price includes a starter, dessert, bread/butter, and one drink.

Where I live in Europe you’ll pay €19 for a burger and fries, so this seems like incredible value.

I commend your optimism, but personally I’m not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don’t think we’re going to fully automate the world economy in that time.

The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:

1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.

It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.

VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They’ve had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.

Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian’s production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they’re hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.

There is a saying in business: Under-Promise, Over-Perform, or Over-Deliver.

SpaceX does the opposite of this.

It literally doesn’t matter though: everyone and their mother are buying falcon 9 or heavy launches. SpaceX accounts for almost 90% of the world’s launched upmass. They are simply the cheapest most reliable option out there and it is not close. The only reason not to fly on a SpaceX rocket is national security or wanting to keep your own domestic launch industry alive.

This wasn’t a SpaceX decision though. The guy who contracted them is the one who cancelled the mission. Mostly because the rocket is not ready yet and he was sick of waiting.

Highly optimistic. For one, the specific parameters of the core dictate the shape, size and configuration of all of the apparatus around it. You can’t just slot in a different heat generator and call it good to go. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that your future fusion reactor core even fits in the footprint of your fission plant. You have no idea what size and shape it will take.

Finally, your assertion is incorrect. Steam turbines, heat exchangers, and cooling towers are comparatively simple, low risk, and well understood parts of a nuclear reactor. The safety features, checks, design reviews, bureaucracy and permitting surrounding the core itself are what take the most time. Any part that could lead to radioactive containment breach.

You need to put this in perspective. Solar and wind waste streams are bigger than nuclear, but much, much smaller than coal and completely insignificant compared to regular old municipal waste.

If you switch from coal to solar right now you will save much more waste than waiting a decade for a nuclear plant to come online. Even if you start building the nuclear plant now, you will still save waste by building solar and throwing it in the trash once your nuclear is online. Anything to switch away from coal faster.

Retrofitting a nuclear fission plant for fusion? There’s no way that’s even remotely feasible, the two are radically different in construction.