Feels to me that making a deal to have the city carried off by bats might actually be easier than resisting the cult of the car.

Does also mean that any indexing via say, web searches will also do the same though.

I guess that's a feature on some sites though! :)

But what I meant is that literally everyone can say the same, and we end up playing a game of 'chicken' whilst the problem gets steadily harder to tackle.

We should totally offer him a knighthood. Would be a bargain.

I feel that high quality solutions to environmental problems is a potential growth area. Both the 'direct' ones - e.g. solar panels, tidal power etc. but also the indirect ones like 'how to configure a city to minimise pollution'.

Mostly that if everyone waits for 'someone else' to lead the way, nothing will ever happen.

Indeed. The problem with climate change has always been that we can kick the can down the road, but each time we do... we have less time to solve a bigger problem.

And we've been doing that for nearly 100 years now...

Honestly whilst I don't know for sure if we can afford to go faster, I'm also really not sure we can afford _not_ to.

Problem with being in 'unprecedented' territory is that we really don't know where the point of no return actually is!

Good things in life are never trite. The more reminders of things worth fighting for the better.

I think being sensitive to sentiment and credibility is important to crypto right now. Whilst eventually the tech will find a niche, and the various options will have fundamentals to dictate a 'true value' at the moment they are heavily speculative.

Loss of credibility might kill a promising tech.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Tech people know the same stuff is still happening behind the scenes, it's just the abstraction layer is making it easier to engage with ... but also much harder to troubleshoot.

As the man himself said, it's become harder and harder to write 'near future' because in the time it takes to write the book, the future has caught up.

I recall another short story I think, about how AI 'evolved' out of spambots vs. spam filters fighting each other.

It's not the politics, it's the fact that Facebook keeps on showing me stuff I don't really are about and hides stuff I've actually indicated I want to see.

Like 'friends posts' and 'groups I've joined' and 'events people in those two groups are hosting'. But instead I get 'engagement bait' posts.

It certainly seems to be the case that the electorate significantly over-values the last 6 months or so.

I've no cause here, I'm just adopting a platform that delivers the content experience I want.
Twitter used to do that, as did Facebook, but the signal to noise ratio has got worse over time.
Social media in general suffers from a critical mass problem though, so a measure of evangelism does help.

I'm really not so sure. As far as I can tell, inheritance tax is always hated out of proportion to it's impact. Far more people object to it than the relatively small number of people who are actually hit by it, and MOST of those only only slightly over the threshold and thus pay a pittance.

Especially if focussing on the tenant farmers who get to rent their farms from said super wealth landlords.