Authoritarianism has a lot of obvious appeal for the authority, but what is in it for the bootlickers? The answer isn't clear, but I think it mostly rests on a sense that it feels safest/strongest to be a member of the tribe whose alpha is the biggest baddest gorilla. People that support an authoritarian leader often believe that the leader will protect them and be on their side.
Of course, anyone who knows even a bit of history of authoritarianism knows that Dear Leader will happily kick people out at the slightest provocation and seems to always need his subjects to make sacrifices he himself never seems to have to make. But there is always no shortage of suckers who just want to feel like they're on a winning team.
It looks like it's supposed to be a general purpose robot servant, although "Follows you around" from the list of skills on the pre-order page is hilariously disturbing. There would be a market for people willing to pay for a very humanlike robot, for the novelty if nothing else.
Plus if you want to make a robot which can do everything a human can do, without exception, you'll start running into weird edge cases if you make it with a fixed wheeled base. Like suppose you want it to climb a ladder or turn sideways to slip into a narrow space and retrieve something. Or maybe you want it to be able to climb in and out of vehicles designed for human occupants. Would you want to have to buy a special vehicle to bring your robot somewhere with you?
And judging by the name of the company and that they likely aspire towards more than what they've made so far, I'd guess that a long-term goal could be to also make something for people who realize the weakness of their flesh and crave the strength and certainty of steel.
The space race was to the death. Both sides thought that losing meant they'd get nuked or taken over by the other. A narrative like that for Mars is harder. "We'll take over the red planet and come back and take over the earth! . . . Someday!"
For better or for worse, the equivalent race right now is in AI.
> The space race was to the death. Both sides thought that losing meant they'd get nuked or taken over by the other.
... Eh? No they didn't, certainly not by the time people were looking at the moon. By then the nuclear doctrine was very well established. The space race was primarily about _prestige_; it was a propaganda thing. That's why it was dropped so completely once the arbitrary goal was reached; little technology from the Soviet programme and virtually none from the US one were used after both countries reoriented around lower-cost space programmes.
In hindsight, the moon race was pretty close to pure propaganda.
I'm not entirely sure they knew it at the time, though. It was likely a bit of a land grab as well?
The moon is potentially a treasure trove. Bringing anything back to Earth is obviously the challenge because of the energy expenditure but in the 50s and 60s they were considering nuclear-powered craft (Project Orion) and at the time, mining the moon probably seemed like it might have been feasible in the next 50 years.
little technology from the Soviet programme and virtually
none from the US one were used after both countries
reoriented around lower-cost space programmes.
Is this really true? We stopped putting people on the moon, but we certainly kept putting things into space (military and otherwise) and was much of that know-how not directly informed by the technology developed for Apollo? Building life support systems, the rockets themselves, etc.
I'm open to correction/clarification; I'm not an expert obviously.
> but we certainly kept putting things into space (military and otherwise) and was much of that know-how not directly informed by the technology developed for Apollo? Building life support systems, the rockets themselves, etc.
It was _informed_ by it, but, for instance the Saturn V's kerosene and hydrogen engines, developed at absolutely horrendous, unthinkable expense, on the justification that it was the moon race and that the cost would be amortised over expected hundreds or thousands of Saturn launches in the future, were thrown away (reusing the hydrogen one occasionally comes up as an idea, but has gone nowhere so far).
Same for the Soviet stuff, to a large extent; the N-1's engines, also very sophisticated, were essentially abandoned (though a derivative was used a long, long time later in a Soyuz launcher). The Soviets did at least keep the Soyuz orbital vehicle (originally developed for their moon programme), but little else.
This all made sense at the time; there suddenly wasn't much money, so reverting to the less capable, less complex, arguably by then previous-gen launchers was rational. But it was really a demonstration that, by then, neither state took any of this at all seriously (even before Apollo 11, the Soviets had all but abandoned their programme); if it had really been seen as a matter of national security, the Saturn C-5N and N1F and all the rest of the planned evolutions would have launched in their hundreds.
There's a lot of psychological factors in markets swinging up and down, and there are always people saying that there's going to be a recession. Also, if you think about HN specifically: if the market is doing well, great. If the market is doing poorly, then cash may be harder to come by, but there's way more upside for growth as the market recovers. Jumping on a fearmongering bandwagon doesn't fit with the entrepreneurial culture of the site.
Are there any companies that are hybrids of this, where they have some fixed structure in terms of voting power that's, say, 60% employee-owned, and 40% which is publicly traded and has a board? So the employee-owned side of things maintains the primacy of their skin in the game because the 60% control that they have is not something which can be amended, but they can also receive outside investment to some degree? As someone who's definitely not an expert on these things, the idea seems intriguing to me, but I have no idea if there are some reasons why this obviously cannot logically or practically work (as opposed to simply being something which people don't presently do--or something which I just haven't heard of people doing).
You can definitely make these kinds of things work and eg worker cooperatives are generally legal to set up around the world, but they don't necessarily work any better than vanilla companies (and that includes not necessarily being better for the employees).
Worked for one with this setup. It was all great until the stock price fell to ~20 % of its original value and has stayed that way since. Employees didn't like it, which was kinda funny (it's a risk they signed up for).
It's called a population pyramid because the shape of that graph for a growing population is a pyramid. If you look at some of the African countries on that site (like, say, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania, if you're starting from the United States page), you can see they're closer to a pyramid shape because they have higher birth rates and higher mortality over time.
Also, on the graph you linked to, you can click on the line in the graph of population versus year to the right, and if you start back in the 1950s and work your way along to the present, you can see the big lump of the baby boomers getting older. That's why people say the United States has an aging population.
> The alternative is dying a natural death of old age. This is apart of the human experience.
This seems almost comically lemming-like. Fear of missing out . . . on dying?
> Getting frozen and brought back in the distant future, even if we assume you'll be in great health, means all your friends and family are gone.
(Assuming none of your friends and family were also frozen.) But more importantly, I wouldn't suggest that people should aspire to death because of losing all their friends and family. If starting over (in what's likely an unfamiliar society and culture) is all one's got, that's still something.
Mainly I find it grotesque that it might be a way to slip past death, but only for rich people. But I can't bring myself to suggest that it would necessarily be a better universe if they took the normal death route instead.
(a) doesn't hold up because the details of the claim necessitate that it is a property of brains that they can always perceive the truth of statements which "regular computers" cannot. However, brains frequently err.
Penrose tries to respond to this by saying that various things may affect the functioning of a brain and keep it from reliably perceiving such truths, but when brains are working properly, they can perceive the truth of things. Most people would recognize that there's a difference between an idealized version of what humans do and what humans actually do, but for Penrose, this is not an issue, because for him, this truth that humans perceive is an idealized Platonic level of reality which human mathematicians access via non-computational means:
> 6.4 Sometimes there may be errors, but the errors are correctable. What is important is the fact is that there is an impersonal (ideal) standard against which the errors can be measured. Human mathematicians have capabilities for perceiving this standard and they can normally tell, given enough time and perseverance, whether their arguments are indeed correct. How is it, if they themselves are mere computational entities, that they seem to have access to these non-computational ideal concepts? Indeed, the ultimate criterion as to mathematical correctness is measured in relation to this ideal. And it is an ideal that seems to require use of their conscious minds in order for them to relate to it.
> 6.5 However, some AI proponents seem to argue against the very existence of such an ideal . . .
Penrose is not the first person to try to use Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for this purpose, and as with the people who attempted this before him, the general consensus is that this approach doesn't work:
There are lots of different flavors of anarchy, and anarchists can't agree on them. Or--and I think this might be quoting or paraphrasing someone: there are as many different kinds of anarchy as there are anarchists. And sometimes their reactions to each other are very strongly negative, like "That's not really anarchy, that's just preserving capitalism via a last-ditch attempt!"
Also I think in the US at least, religion plays into it. God over humanity is conceptually the ultimate hierarchy model that Christians buy into. So it seems like Christians often don't have as much issue with embracing the idea of one person being over another person as a reflection of that model. This seems a little bit funny given how anarchic Jesus was, but he never said, "Yo, check it out, I am literally an anarchist and you should be too," and so they seem to have missed that.
Matthew 28:18-20 'Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”'
At a guess, I'd say it's because Jesus spends a lot of time casting the religious authorities as villains, so this viewpoint is extended to a general belief in antiauthority and consequently pro-anarchy. Except this also misses all the times where he turns around saying "follow the law" and other events where he criticizes antiauthoritism (e.g., his rebuke of Simon Peter during his arrest).
You have to understand Jesus historically as an apocalyptic Jew, concerned with the coming Kingdom of God replacing the corrupt world order. But it was also a restoration of the Kingdom of Israel with a descendant of David as king. That was the meaning of the Jewish messiah. Which is why Pilate had him crucified, and there was a sign saying "King of the Jews".
