Could we use biomass and hydro to bootstrap without fossil fuels?

We might have to go smaller scale, but if we have a playbook to follow, we can skip some wasteful false starts

The risk they don’t seem to imagine is that their ownership and precious property rights are still conditional.

If you impoverish everyone so much that they no longer have a stake in preserving absolute property rights, it becomes a lot easier to sell “nationalise their assets” and “hang them from a petrol station canopy.”

You might be able to find a few bodyguards you can bribe to protect a compound, but you’re not going to be able to guard everything once society no longer sees value in recognizing your claims to ownership.

Even the “robber barons” of the past-- the Carnegies and Rockefellers-- at least knew that public gestures and restraint would help push that day back, but does Musk or Bezos have that level of understanfing?

I bought a '60s VTVM recently. It needs mains voltage, uses two vaccuum tubes, and does less than my $15 Aliexpress digital meter while taking 48 times the space, but golly it’s nifty.

Property rights. The almighty sole principle.

Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing…

And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.

Keep an eye out at thrift shops-- I’ve seen huge tranches of Star Trek novels.

Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?

If we’re going for the cartoon reference, surely Steamed Hams would work:

“Thousands of premium car sales, in this part of the year, in his part of the country, localized entirely within the last seconds of a government incentive scheme?”

“Yes.”

“May I see?”

“No.”

(Musk’s mother, off screen) “The company is on fire!”

“No, mother, it’s just a red hot deal!”

There are two issues with human rights.

One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it’s too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

The other is that it’s a “luxury product”. Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It’s hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can’t even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you’ve gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You’ve got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn’t going to get them to make that choice any faster.

I think they lost the lead to an extent when the ecosystem exploded.

They don’t have anything comparable to Kailh’s click-bar or Gateron’s click-leaf switches.

I figured that when the DOGE fiasco imploded, he would scream "treason’ and make Musk the fall guy to placate people. Wouldn’t roll back anything but a few symbolic changes, but it would let him look the hero.

Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.

The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”

Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.

The livery and angular proprtions give it a nice fututistic look compard to the “half used soap bar” look of the most recent shinkansen designs

Don’t tell him there’s been women on the $1 coin since 1979, and recently themed seasonal quarter reverses that alternate between illegible and just overly busy.

But what data would it be?

Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.

OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE

We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.

That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?

There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.

A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.