Ukraine is not going to spill 140k tonnes of diesel in their front yard.

squid Hitler

That is a movie I would gladly be disappointed by.

But only because this meme overhappened.

It’s not just in the corporate world. Trump is a good example. He’s a complete douchebag and obviously has no clue about anything, but he somehow makes up for it with his extreme self-confidence.

The world is extremely complex, so it’s understandable that posers who claim to have figured it out are popular. I think many people even know that the guy they’re following is full of shit, but they can’t accept that they are victims of forces they don’t control or even understand, so they lie to themselves to at least feel a little bit of security.

It still affects the buyers, though. If I get hacked because I bought crappy “encrypting” hardware, I may not even care about getting my 20 bucks back because I just lost thousands and my life is ruined.

It’s a beautiful and appealing idea that market forces will regulate everything if you just let things go. But we’ve tried that for long enough now to see that the real world is too complex and the consequences of bad regulation are too serious.

Someone posted the question on reddit and someone answered. This happened on the wrong platform, so now they (or other people) have to do it again on a (hopefully) better platform.

Sure, it sucks that reddit has stolen our archive, but this was always in the cards for them, and we willingly played along. It has been clear for a long time that reddit’s top interest is profit, so you don’t even get to be surprised.

Discriminiation has dramatically gone down for many decades. In the 80s, LGBTQ+ people simply didn’t exist in public discourse. If one of them got beat up or even killed for simply existing, it was like it happened on the other side of the world. Things like same-sex marriage weren’t just not possible, it wasn’t even talked about. Calling someone “gay” was a popular insult.

The reason it feels like things are getting worse is because LGBTQ+ people exist now, nobody can ignore that anymore, and everyone has to deal with that. I think most pepole (by far) don’t even care, but a small minority has no idea how to deal with that. And because they are so loud it feels like things are getting worse. But they really aren’t.

Time is one of those things that only exist to drive programmers crazy.

And users will never willingly move away either, so we’re stuck with them getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses.

Makes sense if they are researching this as an energy source.

Yeah, they made double-digit profits. They have been swimming in money for decades and their cash ocean is still getting bigger at an insane rate.

Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.

Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.

Not until we recover from bailing out the US AI industry, which will probably take at least a few years.

I’d put multiple locking mechanisms in. You definitely don’t want a single point of failure with machines that are designed to dismember people.

How easy is it to find a copper deposit? What do they look like? How much should one expect to find? What would you do if you found a significant amount?

I’m sure they had adequate house building apprentices back then. We’re talking about uplifting stone age people, not fitting in.

Wikipedia says gunpower and black powder are the same thing, wut whatever. How do you make it? I knew you need saltpeter, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to find that, and even if I found some by chance, I wouldn’t even know what it looks like. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I know almost nothing about black powder, but I feel like I know more the average person.

The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that’s from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I’m not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don’t have a forge.

Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that’s common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I’d be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.

I’ve seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.

I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.

But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d be banned or worse.

I don’t think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.

The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.

The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.

The wheel isn’t some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It’s probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it’s also useless unless you have roads.

I’m always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.

Strawman: Nobody is asking for free houses for everyone.

The point in the OP is: In the past we were able to house n% of the population while working less and with much worse technolgoy. So why can’t we house more than n% now if we work more and have much better technology?

There are obviously multiple factors here. More people want to live in big cities, which can only expand so much. Living standards have increased, so building new houses is more expensive.

But investors are also expecting more profits from their housing investments. I don’t know the situation in Australia, but in Germany the largest owners of big city houses barely build anything. They buy existing houses, which are often many decades old, and raise the rent. They make double digit profits with that business model while adding zero value to society.

This means tenants often need 50% or even more of their income for rent while building the exact same houses was payed for with only 30% of their tenants income. There are well-off people who could afford new, big houses in the country, but because they live in the city they qualify for social benefits so they can pay rent.

If you spread the houses around and make them normal houses then they’re no longer low cost houses, they’re just houses.

Again, ghettos are not defined by building quality. If only poor people live in a neighborhood of premium houses, you still have a ghetto. And if a diverse group of people from all demographics live next to each other, you won’t have a ghetto even if they all live in budget houses.

Like everybody else, they don’t want to live in ghettos. If there are no ghettos, nobody has to.

Ghettos are not built, they are a result of segregating poor/uneducated/… people into certain areas. If there is no segregation and people from all demographics live in the same area, ghettos do not form and everybody can live in a nice neighborhood.

No, I’d put a group of educated/uneducated, poor/wealthy, native/immigrant, … people in the same place.

Segregation was common policy back then, but nowadays mixed social housing projects aren’t that hard to conceive.