Is there something you'd prefer the shoddy beginnings of a Dyson sphere be doing?
I understand thinking it would be a terrible idea in many ways, but in this scenario I think the only thing an "eco-terrorist" accomplishes is getting more servers to stay on earth where they damage the ecosystem more.
> Desalination will be a West Coast thing. The East Coast has abundant fresh water.
It's not entirely accurate to say that the West Coast doesn't have enough fresh water. Oregon and Washington have a lot of rain, and many groundwater resources.
California kneecaps itself with perpetual deeded water rights and mismanagement/closure/lack of improvement to reservoirs and related infrastructure. There's a long history of this kind of stuff in the state (see the watering LA desert, the Salton Sea experiment, and many others).
Not to pile on, but this is a similar vibe to people telling others to stop complaining about gas prices and just get an EV.
Some people can't afford a $38k car, heck, for some even $10k for a car is out of reach. There are people who have no choice but to buy a 20 year old ICE vehicle and pray it doesn't die. These same folks suffer due to the regressive nature of fuel tax.
> I have a hard time believing this; in the Bay Area, the privilege of simply having a 200A connection is $130/month.
I have a hard time believing that; that's not how PUC-regulated electric rates work in California (neither the old system nor the new system has a panel capacity component.)
That includes government-run utilities, like LADWP, Silicon Valley Power, and SMUD, which have much lower rates than private utilities (And, no, the rate difference is not made up by taxpayer subsidies. They’re just run more efficiently).
You pay $0.40317/day for the connection but you get back $58.23 twice per year. That’s $30.70 per year.
It’s the price of the electricity that’s ridiculous in PG&E territory, not the price of the connection.
Note that many commercial users have a very different structure and pay monthly for their peak usage, measured over a 15 minute interval, and separately for their actual energy usage. So if you get a commercial 200A connection, max it out for 15 minutes, and then leave it idle for the rest of the month, you may pay something silly.
> He's running for governor of California. He's apparently having trouble getting 6,000 signatures or $5000 to get on the ballot, so he's probably not a serious candidate.
The popular, well funded politicians haven't exactly served their constituents well in the privacy domain...
> I’ll take the bait. I’m guessing you don’t pay state tax in Kansas, so you don’t pay my salary. I’m totally down with anyone in the state reading my stuff, though.
With all the federal education grants/aid/what have you, it's hard to imagine that your institution is purely jayhawker funded.
FALSE the claim is that website was anti Tesla while Tesla was trying to build out the electric car market up until about 2018. Which is the funniest thing given that they are a supposedly pro electric vehicles website per name.
They switched once they realized Tesla was actually manufacturing a successful car at the time.
It's worth remember how these companies think historically instead of whitewashing the past.
The claim is that website was providing back information for about 3-4 years because they didn't like Tesla. That invalidates them as a source because they have a bias against that company. Not as you say "musk is really a victim of the website".
I do appreciate your excellent level of trolling though - we could use better level of intelligence out there.
Ah, now the website is biased against poor Musk and I'm trolling you. It's seems that you'll never have to address the issues, just attack anyone who disagrees.
> The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.
I would argue that his general stance on COVID is HIGHLY relevant and not poisoning the well, as is his general stance on other science-related topics, which climate change definitely is. If someone claims that COVID doesn't even exist then I think it is quite fair to immediately discard anything they have to say on this topic.
Mentioning his racism is perhaps poisoning the well, but the other stuff I think is relevant.
That’s a vague hypothetical so I can’t answer it but in this case I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers for ideological reasons, so it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
Don't take this the wrong way, but the run on sentences are quite hard to parse.
> That’s a vague hypothetical
Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers
This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.
> Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
Speech restriction being able to be abused doesn't mean that speech restriction is never appropriate. There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.
> This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.
> Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.
> The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property. This isn't a societal priest class.
Even an extremely slanted Supreme Court didn't find that the actions of the government had significant influence on social media companies and their tamping down of covid misinformation.
> There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.
Great. Waiting for your argument on why this is one of them.
> If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.
I'm curious, how did you come to know that everyone who is asking questions not in line with the consensus belief is a bad faith operator? And what makes you able to assess the framework behind their questions?
> Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.
This is exactly the problem. You're equating the small minority of folks who are using their speech to defraud with the remainder of the "dissent group" (for lack of a better term) who is trying to get to the truth. Then, by claiming the existence of the minority's speech is incredibly dangerous, attempt to ban anything not in line with the orthodoxy.
I'm not defending people using their speech to profit politically or financially. I'm saying the benefit of getting rid of that speech is not worth the collateral damage that would inflict.
How did the folks that questioned the early "masks aren't effective" claim stand to profit? Or the claim that the virus definitely 100% had zoonotic origin? Maybe you believe they were heavily invested in mask manufacturing companies and were imminently about to launch a political campaign on a Sinophobic platform?
> Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property.
There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not sure how much you've gone into the details of what you're saying, but:
- "free speech is not absolute" is not normative, but descriptive (not really relevant to our discussion)
- "private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property" Wrong. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R.... Whether this applies to social media is currently being tested in our court system.
- SCOTUS saying "not much came of this" doesn't mean nobody was wronged, or that much couldn't have come of it. Also, doesn't this (govt intervention in speech) directly contradict your claim that it was just private companies acting in their own domain?
> This isn't a societal priest class.
You're literally advocating for a priest class, who is blessed to discuss "science", because they are doing it in the way that you interpret as "good faithed" and have the right "framework" behind their discourse. Which is exactly what qualified the religious leaders of old times.
I'm incredibly grateful to not live in a time where only certain people could speak on particular topics. I wish more people were.
The word on the street is this is only 2 weeks out.
Right after fulfilling the roadster orders.
And right before the Dyson sphere that will power Grok AI is deployed.
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