Some countries are more rough groupings than cohesive units. The westphalian nation-state isn't always a perfect fit for how the world works. I've visited a number of places where what people identify as starts with caste, religion, region, and maybe nationality is somewhere down that list.

Some people just can't leave money on the table, even if they're comfortable and don't need it anymore. I have known people who are so driven to get over on others, 'the system,' etc that they put more work into shady shit than they would have had to put in at a legitimate job.

People can't give up the flattering self-illusion that they can just tell when someone is lying. That they can read someone's character. Admitting that you can't really read people makes the world a scarier place.

I mean, Ann Rule was a former police officer and later a crime writer. She worked with Ted Bundy on a suicide hotline, and had no idea. You really can't read people. It's just in the movies where the bad person just looks and sounds shifty.

> Look at how many hundreds of millions were wasted on solar roadways.

Hundreds of millions? Where are you getting that number from? Even $100 million seems like it would be off by a factor of 10-20x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Roadways

And these articles aren't about R&D projects, but about products already on the market. DARPA is also doing R&D, but that's just to push the industry forward, enable more improvement. These aren't "projects that keep failing," rather they're products that keep getting purchased and installed.

>Why can they ship hundreds of gallons of fuel to waste but can't just bring water from surrounding areas?

Or their electrical grid might be more robust than the water mains system. Or they may be using solar. Any number of reasons. That you personally think there are better options doesn't mean those buying them share your assessment. Is it really so impossible that some of these people are doing their due diligence before making the purchase decision?

> just a terrible idea that's way less efficient than all currently used ideas.

There are multiple metrics of efficiency. It certainly doesn't compete with mains water. But not all areas have available or reliable mains water. And for water being trucked in, some areas are reliant on corrupt 'water mafias.' Multiple militaries have bought products from various companies in this space. Sure, we can just go with the idea that all of these people, even DARPA, are just really stupid. Or maybe it does suit some use cases. For civilian use, it is priced to compete with bottled water, not with mains water.

https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2021/04/water-from-fresh-air/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-watergen-helping-arizona-native-americans-make-water-from-air/

>>Watergen has deployed its machines in over 60 countries, both developing countries lacking water infrastructure, such as India and Uzbekistan, and in areas of developed countries suffering from drought, such as California.

> actually 99% vacuum

I'm not sure what "99% vacuum" means in technical terms.

https://brilliant.org/wiki/hyperloop/

>>it is instead proposed that the Hyperloop tube operate at very low pressure: 100 Pascals, about 1/6 the pressure of the atmosphere of Mars [1]. This pressure is one thousand times less than atmospheric pressure at sea level and as a result air resistance is drastically decreased. After initial acceleration, Hyperloop pods can therefore mostly glide without applying any thrust until the deceleration at the end of the journey.

But I've read other proposals with higher, or variable, levels of pressure in the tubes.

https://hyperloopconnected.org/2019/02/variable-tube-pressure-a-new-concept/

The point was never to champion Musk's specific proposal. He didn't invent the idea of vactrains, and his white paper is just one paper.

>Total vacuums seem impractical to implement, but partial vacuums are much easier to engineer.

Yes, people were always reading too much into the 'vac' part. It was always reduced air pressure, not hard vacuum on par with intergalactic space. The analysis is only slightly more substantive than the practice of forming fiercely-held opinions of books based just on their title, such as Dawkins' Selfish Gene or Krauss' A Universe From Nothing.

You have to clarify what quality of life you're comfortable with. If you only require mere survival for your residents, it's probably possible. You can make some nutritional goo from algae or some other scalable process that won't require tons of farmland.

But if you want plants, that's going to take space. Even with vertical farming or whatnot, you're going to need space. Space ships on Star Trek etc were not even remotely realistic, or they assumed tech that was basically a magical plot device, such as replicators that can just produce a cup of "tea, Earl Grey, hot" molecule by molecule, on demand. IRL, you'd probably either be growing the plants, or drinking something produced by precision fermentation or cellular agriculture that would approximate the beverage. Such as they're doing with coffee now, with cellular agriculture.

• Dietary compositions by commodity group, United States, 1961 to 2013
• Global agricultural land use by major crop type

Since his name will come up, let's clarify that Elon Musk did not invent the idea of a vactrain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

That being said, I have no idea if the technology is there yet. And I don't think Thunderf00t is the last word on what will and won't work, in the larger scheme of things. Clarke's first law is relevant here:

>>When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

That YouTuber may not be elderly or a distinguished scientist, but someone saying something is impossible should not be taken as a blunt fact. Will we ever get vactrains? No idea. I hope so. Though I'm confident I won't see them deployed at any scale. And The Boring Co's Loop system is not a vactrain.

I think they're conflating multiple use cases. Fuel based on air-captured CO2 = carbon neutral (assuming the use of green energy). Fuel based on plastic sourced from fossil oil/gas = fossil fuels, just with an intermediate step. I agree that we will have a need for some form of fuel for a long while. But that doesn't make all fuel feedstocks equally sustainable. Burning more fossil fuels is bad.

Money is just a store for wealth, a way to simplify exchange. It has a pretty high degree of utility, which will be hard to get away from. We know that money and wealth are not literally the same things.

The money in my checking account and even index funds isn't "lying idle." The wealth is out in the economy in the form of loans, investments, stock ownership, etc. The 'money,' the numbers with the dollar signs, are just entries in a ledger. They aren't 'things' we can poke with a stick to get to work. The wealth is already out there doing stuff.

A "negative interest rate" is just a tax, an x-percent reduction of the numbers in my ledger so you can fund benefits, government procurement, etc. We know that taxes exist. The question is whether you can tax (or impose a "negative interest rate" if you prefer that terminology) the population enough, at a high enough rate, to fund this thing, without them just voting you out of office.

Because a UBI needs to replace Social Security and all the means-tested programs already out there, but for everyone. The problem isn't that people don't understand the nature of money, but that the numbers don't pan out. "But people don't realize that wealth and money aren't the same things" doesn't address that.

Layoffs are being offset by job openings elsewhere. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1968 or so. Wages were creeping up even before the pandemic.

And I haven't seen anyone figure out how to fund a UBI. Not one robust enough to replace all means-tested programs, Social Security, the whole bit. Not enough for everyone to live on. It's not like a UBI is a figured-out problem and someone just needs to finally get off their ass and flip the switch.

I don't know what "limitless growth" means, honestly. Growth in what? You can have economic growth with a plateaued or even declining population. We were never going to have infinite people, infinite energy use, infinite land use, infinite food consumption, whatever.

I don't think people are going to embrace austerity voluntarily. Emissions are already declining in many rich countries, anyway. India, China etc remaining poor was never going to be our plan. Nor are Americans or Europeans going to want to live like a poor person in India in 1980. People like wealth. Comfort, convenience, status goods, travel, a varied diet, etc.

Houses have also gotten much larger. If you compare price per square foot, the increase in price isn't as great. But our expectations have gone up, faster than our income.

• https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/
• https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/median-home-size-in-us/
• https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/todays-new-homes-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-the-living-space-per-person-has-doubled-over-last-40-years/

Per that last link:

>>On a per square foot basis using median home prices and median square footage, the inflation-adjusted price of new homes has been relatively stable since 1973

So our houses are larger, better insulated, etc. Our standards have gone up. But our income hasn't gone up nearly as much.

I think there's a similar issue with childcare, another big issue. When I was a kid, childcare was a random teenager. Plus I was frequently home by myself, at an age where that would be illegal today. But now childcare workers get paid more, are CPR trained, insured, etc. Plus we have more expectation that childcare be enriching, rather than the kid being dumped in front of the television.

The answer is not static, because technology is not static. Automation continues to improve, and even faster change is coming. Culture meat, cellular agriculture, controlled-environment agriculture, etc. So you'll need ever-fewer people working in agriculture, far fewer than work there now (globally), but not zero.

But construction, manufacturing, even sanitation are much harder to automate. We're a long way from a robot being able to clean up a messy house. Think of what it would take to deal with this properly. Cleaning out the garage, sorting out the garbage from what had value, maybe listing the reasonably valuable items (if any) for sale, identifying what may have sentimental or novelty value, etc. There are tons of jobs like this out there that are labor-intensive but not easily automatable.

I also don't see humans "evaporating" suddenly, unless you believe in the Rapture. I don't think the rich are plotting to murder us all. There are, however, plenty on r/Futurology who aspire to kill hundreds of millions of people, or engage in radical population reduction, to "save the environment" or achieve economic justice. I just don't think effectuating that is very likely. I think a more likely issue is population decline from lower fertility rates. But that decline will be relatively gradual.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have

I do think that may eventually lead to the collapse of technological civilization, but I also don't see any remedy for it. Mainly since most of the things demographers trace the declining fertility rates to I consider positive developments. Education, wealth, empowerment for women/girls, etc.

I suspect sub-replacement and in some cases still-declining fertility rates are a more likely issue. Though I think it'll be a long time before that poses any threat of societal collapse. Even assuming we don't incrementally get closer to a post-scarcity economy.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have

Well our housing standards also went up. We could throw up dirt-floor tarpaper shacks with no electricity or plumbing tomorrow, but no one would consider that "real" housing. We used to have single-room occupancy housing, rooming houses, bunk-houses etc that did serve the poor. They've been banned by zoning and NIMBYs, which increases the housing crisis. But even when I advocate for these to be built, people say "that's not real housing!"

Housing could never come down as much as TVs have. But the current housing crisis is mainly because of zoning and other regulations that reserve land for single-family detached homes. We've allowed homeowners to block the building of density, to protect the spiraling value of their asset.

Suburbia doesn't scale well. And unfortunately a century of culture changes, television, etc has linked "the American Dream" with owning a single-family detached home. Which entrenched sprawl and car dependence. Plus people now view housing, even their own home, as an investment. Housing can't both be affordable and a good investment. Those are conflicting goals.

They were cheaper even before smart TVs. Computer monitors are also cheaper, higher resolution, and so on. And a TV going from $10K to $500 can't be made up by them selling your data.

> TV's have vastly improved since then

While also getting dramatically cheaper. This was the same point as with automobiles--they have gotten cheaper even while improving. I brought up the Model T just because it was so iconic, and has historical significance. It wasn't the only data point in those articles.

>How many companies make TV's now

Even TVs from the same companies are far cheaper. I'm not talking just about knock-off brands, but Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, etc.

They aren't making the same cars today they did in 1970. Far more safety features now, safer construction, more fuel-efficient, air conditioning is no longer an optional add-on, etc. But despite all that, yes, they're cheaper after adjusting for inflation.

• https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/how-much-did-popular-cars-cost-every-year-since-1950-in-2020-dollars/
• https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1109174_have-cars-actually-gotten-more-expensive-over-time

Adjusting for inflation, the Ford Model T cost almost $25K. Do we have cars on the market today cheaper than that?

And batteries store energy, while any mention of nuclear power is about generation. So not really the same thing.

Which doesn't work so well for a car or airplane, alas. We're also unlikely to have nuclear cruise ships, nuclear yachts, etc.

Only on Reddit has this never happened. Meanwhile LCD and plasma TVs were ~$10-20K in 2000 or so. Cost of long-distance and international calling has plummeted. Cost of lighting. Cost of computer storage. The list of things that got cheaper for the consumer is vast, and much longer than the list of things that haven't.

If you want to read about sentient AI, I prefer Iain M. Banks' Culture series of books. I also liked the book The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Skynet and the Terminators were a thin plot device to give humans a foe to fight against, for purposes of better storytelling.

>I imagine once the human race's population has been reduced by 90% or so, this world might actually recover from human greed and arrogance.

Why? We are descended from hierarchical apes. Chimps and even bonobos are more violent than humans. Even some birds hoard shiny stuff. Aggression, status-seeking, etc are not uniquely human endeavors. You might have to sterilize the planet to get the peace you want.

>Maybe if I look like a robot instead of a human people might actually care about anything I've ever said and thought. They sit here and stare at their damn screens all day.

But I'm looking at a screen now, caring about what you've written and thought. And what you've written and thought is a fantasy of 90% of humans being slaughtered. That is your contribution.

>What would it be like to walk outside and the only feeling I have is the joy that I had running around playing with my child before other people existed.

Others feel just the same about you. You're just anti-human, wanting to wipe out 90% of humanity, because you think "they" are greedy and arrogant.