Res ipsa locutus of borg

People will be like "some of the facts are wrong but the basic claim is interesting/true" but if you're not an expert in the field how could you know that if you can't trust him to get the facts right?

If you come at the king you best not miss, and this is very much likely a miss even if they did endorse. The risk/reward is just not there.

Presumably his defense would be that they were in pretty heated litigation against each-other in 2024 resulting in a mutual NDA (that she violated with her book) so he couldn't. Still...

Lena A note from the author You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". This articl...

qntm also wrote the single best story about brain uploading I know of, in the form of a wikipedia entry: qntm.org/mmacevedo

For near-future have you read Blindsight and its sequel? Also his Rifters series which is inferior but also good. Snow Crash is a classic as well. And depending on your definition of near-future there's also The Quiet War by Paul McAuley (a much smarter better version of the Expanse).

Not to excuse not reporting on this sooner but I do think he may plan to talk more about this in future installments... He's doing a jumping-back-and-forth-in-time thing.

Ok, pretty funny of Zohran’s people to put out the absolute model of the sort of statement that drives Bluesky absolutely *insane* to be studiously ignored On Here because of the source

But for a lot of lefties it's extremely attractive to blame everything bad on money because it removes any need to wonder about whether their agenda is actually popular (same people are absolutely convinced single payer is wildly popular based on a few misleadingly phrased polls).

Also well-meaning campaign finance people in the 90s/early aughts convinced a huge number of leftwing people that the source of all political evil in the US is money in politics. There was some truth to that but there's less now and it's only one factor.

Also since when do federal judges use the royal we???

Carl Zimmer too.

Definitely possible there will be a sudden crisis somewhere in the US, Tehran style, and a resulting political crisis. But it's not going to end with people in big cities turning on the taps and having nothing come out.

But a lot of people really don't understand the difference between "there will need to be significant economic and lifestyle adjustments to deal with much less water being available absent a solar/desal get of jail free card" and "the southwest will be uninhabitable."

Oh yeah, the compact is a mess and there won't be enough water to go around. A lot of sub-optimal choices will be made I think and it will be distributed unequally. Some small communities may indeed be screwed because they have less political power than ag.

Well the CO compact is a bit different than reducing household use, but I don't think we actually disagree. I just mean that you can implement restrictions on household use either through intrusive regulation or pricing, whichever you think is more democratic.

Phoenix and Las Vegas are pretty aggressive about this as I understand it, though I don't know what Israel does. But also this is a problem prices are going to be really good at solving! People will complain but the "phoenix will become uninhabitable" takes are silly.

But also if water gets many times more expensive than it currently is people will survive -- it's still a tiny percentage of household incomes.

Yeah I'm not an expert and it seems like the tech isn't there quite yet. But it does work really well with solar bc you can run it when power is cheap and then use the water whenever.

If push comes to shove people vote and cotton doesn't -- there will be plenty of water in Phoenix for the people if its needed if the farmers stop using it.

Cheap solar + desalinization will get us there in a few decades, probably?

"Democrats" didn't fail to abolish the filibuster, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema did. One was primaried and the other held a seat no other democrat could conceivably have won.

If that's what they think though it can explain why they continue to expand even if they aren't making money yet.

Waymo Is A Trillion-Dollar Opportunity. Google Just Needs To Seize It. The self-driving tech unit is expanding but if Alphabet pushed harder, Waymo could dominate a new market with the potential to generate more revenue than its ad business.

Some interesting, though not confirmable, claims here that they are approaching making money in SF (though I imagine that depends a lot on what you count as expenses): www.forbes.com/sites/alanoh...

Do we know that's actually Waymo's burn rate? I thought alphabet didn't break it out of its "other bets" category in its financial reporting? But maybe that's been reported out and I missed it...

The FBI can come to you and suggest you do crimes, then fake-give you all the things you need to do the crimes, and you still probably won't get off on entrapment.

Almost nobody ever gets off on entrapment. The standard is ridiculously high.

Do we know it's not? Waymo has been expanding like crazy--I get that they are probably not profitable yet but they must have some plan to get there? The expansion doesn't make sense otherwise does it?

Just waiting for the next time you write something insufficiently dogmatic and the most braindead people on this website use this to show you are a MAGA goon.

The Graeber debt book is definitely full of claims that are laughably false: crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/t...

Exactly!