That’s what the successful decades long Russian psyop would want you to believe.
I’m not talking primarily about agent Krasnov allegation from a top Kazakh ex-spook (though that is an actual possibility), but about the well known Russian influence operations by financing what used to be extremists (both far-right and far-left) across the West.
And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
If they ctually used that wealth to advance the human race (on the ground, not a hypothetical but infeasible future on another planet) that'd be another matter. A percentage of Musk's theoretical wealth can solve every American's financial trouble, give them an education, and make the US great again. But that means giving some of it away and they may need it for... What, anyway? What does Musk use his money for besides buying companies and spawning babies against their will?
At least MBS (an autocrat whose wealth and country are one) spends his money on stupidly large building and opulence like The Line and whatnot, which will either make the UAE the center of world wealth and prosperity, or which will be interesting to archeologists in 2000-4000 years.
> And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
But that's the problem of the 'capitalist west' (i'm not sure what is better or what would work); everyone is out for short term gain. Most people care about themselves and some of their close family/friends, but in the end, they couldn't give a flying f if the entire planet implodes when they die. We should be planning on a 2000 year timeline as humanity but instead we plan on 4-8 years instead. So far (but that might be reading the wrong propaganda), China seems to have a plan beyond 4 years and beyond Xi's life and not be in such a neckbreaking hurry of breaking everything over a few years more or less.
Or in jail. We’re not at the coup stakes of life and death, but we’re also like two months into this Presidency. (For what it’s worth, Trump isn’t currently being coup-ish. That’s been left to the pretender.)
It doesn't look like they're targeting the right things, given how much they've put into going after the FAA, NHTSA and NOAA. Not exactly dark-state power centers. Rather, they're people who've pissed of Elon specifically.
It seems like they're spending 30% of effort on the areas that are likely to foment a counter-coup and 70% of their time attacking groups they have personal beefs with.
But of course they're not just focusing on the powerless, they're also annoying the powerful enough that I don't see how it ends well for them.
Haha, yeah, it's not like the president hasn't put in 3 of the SCOTUS judges who give him a 6/9 majority. Or replaced the chief joint of staff and each respective head of every military branch and each respective judge of each military branch. Or the head of the FBI or the director of the FBI. Or the secretary of defense. That would be crazy.
It's not like he's stopping aid to Ukraine while ruminating on dropping sanctions on our second largest enemy state and repeating word-for-word Kremlin talking points after having a prior relationship with their criminal enterprises for his real estate and an intelligence community espouse the use of foreign power to influence his election outcomes. That would be nuts.
It's not like he attempted to overthrow the government when he lost an election 4 years ago, then pardoned the violent criminals who were incarcerated for that act.
It's not like he's destroying all trade partnerships with allies and internal infrastructure/manufacturing investments simultaneously. That would be silly.
Reaching the altitude of space is much, much, easier than reaching orbital velocity.
This meant that during the Global War on Terror, people had legitimate questions about if Al Qaida could damage the ISS. The answer then was "no", but amateurs reached the Kármán line in 2004, students in 2019, and the current altitude record holder is 143 km.
I suspect that it is well within the capacity of random drug cartels in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica to destroy a Starship during launch, if they so desired.
A functioning US government is a reason not to do that. Nobody in any of those countries will want to risk Musk asking Trump for a favour in the form of a USSOCOM operation.
For what it's worth, I'm not convinced by the change of name.
No matter if I write "postmarket", "PostMarket" or "posTmArkeTOs", the first result I get in my search engine is postmarketOS. In terms of how hard it is to pronounce, it feels like as soon as the context is there, one can say "pmOS". Kubernetes doesn't seem particularly easy to pronounce, but it doesn't seem like it's preventing it from being successful.
As a comparison, try to Google for /e/, or eos... I think it's getting better but a couple of years ago I was just not reading the /e/ changelogs because I just couldn't find the website. This, IMHO, is a bad name; and I have been a pretty satisfied user of /e/ for years, it's not like I don't like the project. But to be very honest, if CalyxOS had supported my phone I would have switched just because of the frustration with the name.
Also with every change of name comes confusion. For a very long time some people will keep calling it "postmarketOS", some will think it's a brand new project or a fork. Third-party documentation/blog posts will not get updated, ever. It takes time and energy to change a project name. And for what? Because it's "a bit too long" and "not so easy to pronounce"? I don't think it's worth it. It would be different if the project was called muskRocksOS.
Yeah, they could promote pmos (or maybe something like postos) to more prominently feature as a primary keyword, but in today's age of minimalism where it feels like every project is a single syllable word clashing with 100 others like it, I love a name that actually just says what it is on the tin.
I don't like renaming things as much as the next guy, but they're targeting an international audience. Ask a Chinese/Japanese/Arabic/whatever speaker if it's easy to pronounce (it is for me, but that's because I speak relatively passable English; judging from past experience, my friends would certainly find this name unpronounceable).
> Third-party documentation/blog posts will not get updated, ever.
OTOH that could also be an advantage. For at least a year or so after they change the name, all info you can find about how to do something with it when you search with the new name is likely to be current. Instead of 7 year old guides that are completely out of date and don’t work with current versions.
I recently switched to them as a step to help de-Google. Will not go back to standard Android and push for /e/OS at the moment. I don't mind the extra weight and size between the Fairphone 4 and Pixle 5a.
Waiting on a purchase from Furi Lab to see if I can move even further away.
Issue with most phone hardware with Linux is that they are all past products that don't have G5 support. Looks like all the push for Linux phones is coming from the EU and stale and stagnate in the USA, hardware wise.
I am not sure I understand. If you don't trust the project to the point where you think they may inject malicious code into the local cargo config file, why would you trust the source code you are building?
At the end of the day, you build code to run it. If you don't trust the code you build, probably you should not build it in the first place?
The problem I have with the idea of subsidising small drones as a proxy for defense is that they solve very different problems: Making a small quadcopter that flies is now entirely solved: you take an open source autopilot, put it on some open source autopilot board, and that's it.
If you go further than that, successfully producing delivery drones means that they need to carry a payload safely to some destination, deliver the payload nicely (as in, smoothly leave a parcel on the ground), come back and be reusable. The drone flies by GPS, but doesn't really need a radio signal (ideally there is no operator, the drone just goes, delivers and comes back).
Killer drones are "one-way". They are defined by a lifetime of like 25min, ending up violently in a place where the operators care about maximising damage. They fly in war zones. Nobody really cares if some percentage of the drones falls from the sky or doesn't explode upon contact. They need to fly in GPS-denied mode, and they probably need a radio for the operator to select the target when the times comes. This has to be a military-grade radio that works in the presence of jamming to some extent.
Those are very different projects. Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
Bomb and kamikaze drones based on civilian drones are already a reality though, Ukraine uses to defend itself. Don't know why you're talking as if that wasn't possible, when it's happening already.
Hmm maybe I'm not being very clear, I didn't want to write a 20 pages essay :-). I was saying that I don't think it's a particularly efficient way to approach defense.
My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.
If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today.
In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.
Ukraine is absolutely buying all the civilian drones it can get, especially the larger ones with good optics.
One of the previous defense minister was skeptical of their utility too and called them “wedding drones”, and now you can see very frequently in war footages mentions how they are using “wedding drones” in this or that reconnaissance or surveillance operation.
You absolutely need tens of thousands of drones in the air all the time to support modern warfare.
And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.
“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.
Yes, but that is simply because they don't have a better choice.
Given the choice between a $200 DJI and a $100 homebuilt "killer" drone, you would probably want 2x of the killer drones. However, if your bottleneck is your manufacturing capabilities instead of your money, then you might be forced to use the DJI drones instead of the custom killers.
It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other.
DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on.
Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the video data is a significant chunk of the total personnel in this war.
Without having that, killer drones are not effective, since they are very short-lived, have very poor cameras and power characteristics. It is very difficult to find enemy with self-made drones.
So I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly into a cheap mass produced war-time surveillance drone with minimal effort.
The same goes for software - both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".
Hmm, I feel like you get back to "Ukraine needs everything it can get". Sure, but that's not my point.
For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right?
> I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly
It could potentially be repurposed relatively quickly if it was well designed. But what tells you it will be? Most software is not very well designed, and in the western drone industry it's particularly right, in my experience. If you subsidise a company to make military drones and they write bad software, you will still end up with a military drone ("the software is bad but it lasts 25min most of the time"). If you subsidise a company to make survey drones in the hope that their design will be good enough to be quickly ported to military needs...
> both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".
I highly doubt that. Civilian radios are easily jammed.
In practice, jamming of wide area is not a solved problem. It is easy to jam GPS because its signal is already weak, or a cell phone in a city, but it is very difficult to jam a drone in the sky which have a line-of sight to the antenna or a retranslation drone. Also all modern cheap drones have a way to switch frequencies if one gets jammed, and jamming all frequencies is also very very difficult.
You either need to have a very big powerful machinery - which is very easy to detect location of and send a HIMARS rocket. Or a huge number of smaller devices, which is impractical as you don't have power in trenches.
So in practice, drone jamming is only effective in the last 100-200 meters from the target (if it is a vehicle with power source) which doesn't really matters for surveillance drones as they do their job from the distance.
> Civilian radios are easily jammed.
In theory, in practice on the battlefield, when drones can switch frequencies on the go - very very difficult with the exception of the last hundred meters.
Because of this, modern killer drones now have a primitive "AI" to lock on the target on the last meters of approach.
I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.
And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary
They're not "based on civilian drones" other than using some basic software and electronics and design principals. Everything else is built around cheap and short lifetime.
> Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
I mean, in WWII, a lot of car manufacturers made tanks instead. Buick made the Hellcat, Chrysler, Ford and a variety of train manufacturers made the Sherman, and on and on. The skills are much more transferable than a lot of other fields.
In fact, this is explicitly why the US and others subsidize their passenger car industries.
This probably wouldn't work as well today, because most modern automakers just do engine design, assembly, and pick some parts out of a Bosch catalog, but I bet the more ambitious, vertically integrated automakers like BYD or Tesla could do an OK job in a pinch.
>>Feels a bit like saying that subsidising personal cars is good for the tank business.
Funny you should say that. The US had in 1938 a grand total of about 38 tanks. WWII started a few years later, and after converting prewar automobile factories to tank factories, the USA built more tanks than every other nation combined.
Pretty much the same thing happened for airplanes, as mentioned in the article.
US industrial production was literally the arsenal of democracy.
It is a LOT easier to convert commercial manufacturing base to military purposes than to start from scratch. So, yes, subsidizing commercial production to stay in-country is definitely good for mil readiness (and ultimately, the tank business).
I have the impression from reading history books that the workforce at the time of World War 2 was uniquely specialized and widely available. There were many machinists that had special knowledge and experience of how to run their lathes, presses, etc. This workforce was involved in the assembly line of passenger cars, so you had expert machinists involved in producing passenger cars which made expertise widely available. Because of their knowledge, they could easily pivot to an armored vehicle (for example).
In today's world the assembly line itself is derived from CAD, robot CNC machines, and the workforce is not specialized. The workforce consists of "assemblers" and machine operators, moreso than "machinists" or "machine designers"
This difference between workforces is a potentially profound difference.
Good points, although a nit that I'd characterize the workforce as more specialized today rather than less. Didn't the old-school machinists have more knowledge over the full range of production processes, vs a CAD drafter vs a Fanuc CNC operator, vs an assembler?
That said, I'd still say having one capability today still makes a far shorter path to convert from Civ-to-Mil output. I run a carbon-fiber composites shop that does everything from design through materials, CAD, CAM, moldmaking, forming with multiple technologies, CNC machining, and assembly. It would be a straightforward task to setup for new Mil products (and not just because we already do some Mil work), especially compared to not having it at all.
Military vehicles had much more in common with their civilian counterparts in the WWII era. Technologies have almost entirely diverged since then. An M4 Sherman tank had a gasoline piston engine and steel armor. An M1 Abrams tank has a turbine engine, and uranium and ceramic composite armor. To convert a factory from one to the other you'll have to rip out almost everything and start over.
Yes, mil tech has diverged, and much of modern manufacturing requires highly specialized tooling that requires long lead times to get into production.
That is an excellent reason to subsidize maintaining convertible or dual-use tech in the civilian arena. e.g., make sure turbines are used in more civilian uses. Stockpile tech that is really civilian incompatible such as the depleted uranium armor.
Turbines are a good example of how a civilian tech could have gone differently. In the 1960s several turbine-powered cars were in development for street use and a turbine race car qualified and lead most of the 1967 Indianapolis 500 race. But then the USAC effectively disqualified it [0], and civilian development stopped for other reasons. But it arguably might have continued had turbine power been allowed to race and dominate.
Yet, turbines are used both for aircraft and for natural gas power, both stationary and portable, and there are many small turbines. So, of course, we would not go to an ICE engine builder but to the builders of aircraft and gas power plants. There are also manufacturers of small-scale turbines that might ramp up.
On the other hand, we can also look at how modern warfare has changed over the last three years. multi-million dollar tanks are being reliably destroyed by $800 drones. And drone tech is highly fungible. Many common computer chips and boards can be used to control it, many common lightweight motors will work, and composites or lightweight metals can make the bodies. All of these technologies are highly configurable, so it would be a short lead time to make new factories to turn out pretty much whatever shape drone we wanted, whether it is flying, rolling, or swimming.
They may have the manufacturing muscles but Ukraine has been able to develop and test their drones in live combat for years. There's nothing that propels technology forward as much as deadly necessity.
This sounds like it's dramatically under-estimating the Chinese engineers. If you take a drone today, like a DJI Mavic. Pretty much every single component of that drone is better than what we can do - at scale - in the West. It's not like we sent them blueprints and they mass produced the drones. Their technology is first class, arguably better than the West in the field of robotics.
> In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.
How does it work? Doesn't it mean that if a state seceded now, the Supreme Court may still decide that it is constitutional? Genuinely interested.
When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.
- Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700
A state cannot itself just decide to leave. It has to be allowed to go or successfully fight its way out of it. The secessionists' revolution failed; thus they were never not a part of the US.
So, I guess they could unilaterally leave, assuming they win their revolutionary war. But otherwise no, they can't unilaterally leave without the rest of the union agreeing to it somehow. The governor can't just sign a piece of paper and say California is now its own country separate from the United States and have that take effect from the perspective of the federal government. California would still be legally considered a State in the United States.
I find it very interesting that the Constitution doesn't say that a state cannot leave, which suggests that when the state joined the union, it did not explicitly accept this condition.
Then later, when a state wants to leave, it is the Supreme Court (representing all the states) that says "hmm so it was not written, but we now decide that we don't want you to leave".
By [the Articles of Confederation], the Union was solemnly declared to "be perpetual." And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained "to form a more perfect Union." It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?. . . When, therefore, [a state] became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.
> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later
What if you could, but it was 10x more expensive? Obviously you wouldn't want it. Now take a step back and realise that for many people, having drones flying over the city all day long is enough of a reason to not want it.
Drone delivery is a fundamentally bad idea. That is, except for the exceptional cases where it matters (like a medical emergency).
Drones won't replace trucks; they are aiming at the last mile. There is already a perfect way to deliver a small payload over a mile: take a bike. That's healthy, that's economical, that's ecological, that's quiet. Why isn't Amazon working on that? Because it doesn't bring them profit.
They are working on that, well... kind of. They somehow convinced the NYC government to allow them to legally operate little trucks in bike lanes. They claim that they are "bikes" (bikes have two wheels, that's what "bi" means, these have four)
I like those vehicles, honestly -- delivery trucks are going to park in the bike lane regardless and these are much smaller and safer to maneuver around. I want to see more of them and hope it leads to more bike lanes being built in NYC.
Amsterdam lets little vehicles like this operate in its bike lanes. They can't be capable of going over ~30 mph. I imagine a similar policy is being followed here.
Normally I have no problem with "bicycles" having more than two wheels operating in bike lanes (for example: recumbent trikes, trailers), but I agree - those vehicles seem more like golf carts than cargo bikes. I'd be interested to know how much they weigh empty and what proportion of their power comes from the rider rather than the "assist." Probably better for the city overall than a full size truck but I wouldn't be stoked to share the bike lane with one...
Also those are definitely going to be parked blocking the lane lol.
The niche for drone delivery is the one that Zipline found - delivering medical supplies in remote areas with poor road access.
For the majority of cases, it's a stupid idea. If you really want to automate away delivery drivers, self-driving vans probably make more sense, when self-driving tech gets good enough.
I agree with your point, and I think that there are a few exceptional cases (some of which I believe Zipline addresses) where the alternative to the drone delivery is nothing. But to my knowledge, those are very rare use-cases.
Amazon isn't working on that because they have a bunch of software developers and they need to justify their existence with something other than making AWS better or fixing the bugs with their shopping website. Drone delivery is probably a "sexy" project some EVP or C-level is pushing because they want to add it to their resume.
Amazon are piling money into this because being able to deliver a small package over the last mile with zero people involved is a massive win to them. People are lazy, unreliable, hard to manage, and demand luxuries like toilets and water. The sooner they can get rid of them the better.
It adds a very low cost per-package low-package no person required option to their delivery options. A truck with a human will almost always be cheaper, but if you have a single package that will take a 10 minute detour for a driver due to a fluke of purchasing patterns, being able to drone deliver it could reduce the cost of that specific package delivery significantly, thus reducing overall system costs especially if that truck can now spend more time delivering goods in denser areas.
You are forgetting about the fact that the truck, and the industry behind it, already exist.
How many new factories, mining operations, flights and ships will be required to start providing Amazon with the millions of new drones per year it will need to achieve this?
This is not just a quick and easy way to replace a 10 minute detour. It is a new multi billion dollar industry which uses countless tons of materials and more energy to create millions more new plastic 'things' which will cost lots in energy and materials whilst simultaneously causing lots more waste on the planet.
I don't think these drones are for places that can be traversed safely or reasonably on bicycle. They're great for suburban sprawl where cycling isn't really viable and road trips take 10x as long to reach the places a drone can go.
> We're literally on the verge of collapsing
> because of climate change and mass extinction
We're really not, and that's not me being a climate change denier, but deferring to the UN's IPCC reports on the topic. I encourage you to read the reports. Yes, we're in some trouble, but even their bleakest predictions are nowhere near "collapse".
> Robots are not solving any of those problems.
How many of these people getting toothpaste or whatever delivered by electrically powered drone would alternatively be firing up their dinosaur-powered F-150 to drive to the local supermarket instead? It's solving that problem.
> How many of these people getting toothpaste or whatever delivered by electrically powered drone would alternatively be firing up their dinosaur-powered F-150 to drive to the local supermarket instead?
Why do you want to solve the last symptom in the long chain of failure upon failure, by adding on more atrocity in the mix ?
If I want toothpaste I walk 250 meters to my closest shop and buy some damn toothpaste
> How many of these people getting toothpaste or whatever delivered by electrically powered drone would alternatively be firing up their dinosaur-powered F-150 to drive to the local supermarket instead?
How do you suggest toothpaste should occur in the real world? I can only go to the store with my electric vehicle which uses organically mined lithium in its batteries, charged by free trade manufacturered solar panels? To get toothpaste which hasn't been tested on animals (only humans) made up of chemicals that don't use any "bad" chemicals?
You seem to think that everything you do requires buying a commercial product, with no alternatives. That is the success of the capitalist advertising industry.
It really isnt as hard as you think to live a low impact life without buying more stuff to help you do it.
Personally I walk or cycle to the store, and buy toothpaste that is made from zero chemicals and is packaged in 100% recycled materials.
If you want to go further than that, then before companies started convincing people that they needed to buy toothpaste, people used crushed charcoal from their fires alonog with mint leaves for freshness. Free, no transportation required, and just as effective, if not more so.
I am very happy to subscribe to this kind of lifestyle in order to reduce human impact on a global scale. Are you?
I try and live a low impact lifestyle. I reuse, drive an old ICE car sparingly, I buy more expensive stuff that lasts instead of cheaper disposable stuff when I can, I recycle, I compost.
I'm just not pretentious about it, and have no illusions about where my food comes from.
did it not occur, or is it not how other people live? yes I'm guilty of projecting that other people drive to the store despite living somewhere that I can take the public electric trolley and walk to places in my life.
> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later, and there's just this humming noise outside because of it?
> I try and live a low impact lifestyle
Personally I would say that these 2 statements contradict each other.
I'm not the one who can't handle the fact that advancements in medicine that have happened since Aristotle come hand in hand with the industrial revolution and capitalism.
No you are the one denying that the majority of our knowledge of the human anamtomy came from before that period, and that it was entirely possible without corporations delivering us truckloads of stuff from warehouses to make it happen.
Where did I say that Aristotle wasn't a foundational scientist? it's just that we're not at CRISPR and mRNA vaccines without the rest of modern society.
> but deferring to the UN's IPCC reports on the topic. I encourage you to read the reports.
Did you actually read them? They say that in order to keep the temperature raise below 1.5/2deg, we essentially have to reduce the global economy by 1 covid crisis every year and find a miracle way to capture CO2 massively. So they really say "it's pretty bad".
But that's not all! The IPCC reports require some kind of consensus and are notoriously optimistic! Every single year, what we observe (as in, we measure) is that the IPCC models were optimistic. Every. Single. Year. So the IPCC reports say "it's pretty bad", and this is optimistic!
Finally, we are living a mass extinction right now. It's not a prediction, it's a measurable fact. Life on Earth is collapsing, already. Remember the dinosaurs? What got them extinct is the climate change that followed the asteroid, right? It was a lot slower than what we are measuring right now.
So yeah... the only thing I can imagine could keep us alive where the dinosaurs (and most big animals) got extinct is technology. But you know what? Technology is globally adding to the problem! Again, not predictions but facts: every year with emit more CO2 thanks to the "progress" in technology. A lot of technology is getting better and requires less energy, but rebound effects completely cancel that progress.
We are on the verge of collapsing, and at a time in history where we would need to be extremely smart and work together, the geopolitical instability is increasing by the day.
Are we doomed? Probably. But if there is a chance we survive, what we need is to do less with less, but in a much more clever way. Lots of work for engineers and scientists, but not on AR headset or LLMs. For some reason nobody is interested in saving our arse, they'd rather try to get rich.
Ironically, it's destabilising itself on its own.
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