"Scientists" paid by oil companies are the marketing department in lab coats.
From the World Economic Forum: Antarctica is losing a staggering 150 billion tons of glacier ice a year, and this rate of ice loss is accelerating. The main cause is ocean warming, which not only melts the ice sheet directly, but also thins the floating ice shelves that hold the ice sheet on land. As the ice shelves lose strength, they allow more ice to flow into the sea, raising the sea level.
The sea ice that surrounds the continent has been shrinking since 2016. This winter’s maximum sea ice extent was 1.75 million km2 below the 1981-2010 average, which means that an area the size of Libya was effectively missing.
The air above Antarctica is also heating up, causing surface melting that can trigger the collapse of ice shelves. In March 2022, East Antarctica was hit by the most extreme heatwave ever recorded on Earth, with temperatures soaring 38℃ above normal. If this heatwave had occurred in the summer, temperatures above melting point would have been reached in the coldest place on the planet for the first time.
How's your level of false information? For instance, if I ask about highly technical specifics, such as how load bearing architecture works or a tutorial on loop quantum gravity, will your LLM fabricate information or are sources easily available for the presented facts?
Personally, I would be very interested if the system provides a simple method of fact checking.
This is a great idea. Currently it does not browse the internet at all, it is just using typical GPT requests with whatever it is trained on which can hallucinate. However, I think it can be pretty accurate at most things. Adding the ability to fact check any given part of the course is an awesome feature idea!
In that case, it is time for regulators to step in to use the Tesla charger design as the basis for an industrial standard that anyone can build, like USB 3.1 or RJ-45.
The constant "As I'll talk about later" thing makes my eye twitch. Either talk about it when you bring it up or save it for later. If you do talk about it, you can always add more details later that would not have initially made sense.
An increase in homelessness and drug addicts could easily be explained by people travelling to Oregon for treatment. This is not the sort of thing that "public perception" is particularly good at understanding. Changes like this take time. Effectiveness needs to be measured by hard data, not opinion polls.
By the way, for your air example: compressed air would be an example of value over the naturally abundant resource. Profit on one of those little cans of air used to clean your keyboard is the "value capture".
Water, on the other hand, is a municipal resource that is supported through taxation. The private companies that handle most of the work are highly regulated because clean water is considered a public good. Bottled water through private companies does have a staggeringly high profit margin.
In the case of compressed air, actual work is being done to make it... compressed air.
With water, it is still very very cheap relative to the value it provides. Why isn't water 20% of the GDP of the world? Isn't it that important? (https://alexdanco.com/2015/11/23/ways-to-think-about-water/, never read this essay btw, read several of Alex's other essays though. I'm assuming the essay talks about the importance of water)
Software isn't static nor does it exist on it's own. You're not paying for the current version. You're paying for support, security patches, and for the next versions to be written. In the case of software services, you're also paying for administration, active network security, networking, and hardware operations.
Software is a lot like art or literature. The creator needs to be able to live in order to continue creating. Otherwise updates, new versions, and new creations become highly irregular or utterly non-existent.
Profit extracted from companies over the cost of business exist because that is how all businesses function. Profit is literally the point of capitalism. Investment in companies would not happen without the promise of a return. Even the smallest of businesses would not be possible without profit.
For a non-tech example, eggs don't cost $3.99 per dozen to produce. Eggs are expensive because of an extremely high profit margin. Is it justified? Price gouging? Currently there is no hard rule that differentiates the two.
Whether or not there should be a profit percentage cap is an entirely different conversation and not unique to tech. Personally, I think there should be a maximum amount of profit expressed as a percentage of unit cost that should be legal. Further, I think that an equal percentage of the unit cost should always be applied to wage increases equally across the company for non-management roles. Management should be paid out of the extracted profit percentage.
Your first and second paragraphs are better arguments for subscriptions over one-time payment than they are for the existence of high profit margins despite software's cheapnes.
3rd paragraph. I'm not arguing against profits just, overly high ones in the face of cheap 'raw materials'.
4th and 5th. Questioning high profit margins in businesses (didn't realize eggs too had high margins tbh) and wondering if profits should be capped seem like obviously related things.
Solutions? In the case of SaaS:
— Product pricing starting high, but declining over time (yes, literally making laws that new software MUST be absurdly expensive at first).
Would mean:
(i) Fewer 100th x competitor software product since it's hard convincing people to part with say $100, you need to actually have a 10x solution.
(ii) Increased organic word of mouth growth, since users have an incentive (declining pricing) to increase total users.
From the World Economic Forum: Antarctica is losing a staggering 150 billion tons of glacier ice a year, and this rate of ice loss is accelerating. The main cause is ocean warming, which not only melts the ice sheet directly, but also thins the floating ice shelves that hold the ice sheet on land. As the ice shelves lose strength, they allow more ice to flow into the sea, raising the sea level.
The sea ice that surrounds the continent has been shrinking since 2016. This winter’s maximum sea ice extent was 1.75 million km2 below the 1981-2010 average, which means that an area the size of Libya was effectively missing.
The air above Antarctica is also heating up, causing surface melting that can trigger the collapse of ice shelves. In March 2022, East Antarctica was hit by the most extreme heatwave ever recorded on Earth, with temperatures soaring 38℃ above normal. If this heatwave had occurred in the summer, temperatures above melting point would have been reached in the coldest place on the planet for the first time.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/11/antarctica-climate-c...