This is a fantastic idea. I hope the nerds can solve some big problems but the dividends and…what was the other bit? I forget…sounds good.
And as far as world government goes, that’s a problem with an existing solution put forth by the two guys who write The Expanse series as James SA Corey: we simply strap some humans onto a rocket (SpaceX most likely at this point) and shoot them to the asteroid belt, thus creating a new human society that Earth can exploit/unite against. So maybe some of the nerds could work on making that happen also. (Highly recommend the book series, and I really like the TV show too.)
> We needed a miracle, and they delivered one, fast.
Comically fast. The truth is, it wasn't a miracle - it was just a little bit of engineering. Vaccine - one by Moderna, exactly the same as was later used to vaccinate - was designed in two days, in January 2020.
Your Cartman analogy is way too generous. In real life, we have Bureaucracies which actively fight against attempts to help. And almost no one sees the problem. Certainly they don't want to change that.
And then they bitch about ridiculous cost of things like healthcare, or about Big Pharma - after bravely ensuring there can't ever be Small Pharma, because to sell just a single generic drug, it requires bearing upfront costs of millions of dollars to have a chance FDA will graciously "approve" of selling.
> Unfortunately, “culture of conservation” is nothing more than a nice thought; it would, indeed, be nifty if humanity developed an ethic of environmental stewardship that would mitigate climate change.
Yes. "SOCIETY IS FIXED, BIOLOGY IS MUTABLE"
"See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”"
"Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean."
"And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs."
"On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. (...) the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades"
"Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine."
"What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?"
(hilariously, it seems like we do have good weight-loss drugs now: semaglutide, tirzepatide. Of course, these require prescriptions and there isn't a massive effort to use them to just kill obesity. State actively fights against it. Annoying as hell.)
This is a fantastic idea. I hope the nerds can solve some big problems but the dividends and…what was the other bit? I forget…sounds good.
And as far as world government goes, that’s a problem with an existing solution put forth by the two guys who write The Expanse series as James SA Corey: we simply strap some humans onto a rocket (SpaceX most likely at this point) and shoot them to the asteroid belt, thus creating a new human society that Earth can exploit/unite against. So maybe some of the nerds could work on making that happen also. (Highly recommend the book series, and I really like the TV show too.)
> We needed a miracle, and they delivered one, fast.
Comically fast. The truth is, it wasn't a miracle - it was just a little bit of engineering. Vaccine - one by Moderna, exactly the same as was later used to vaccinate - was designed in two days, in January 2020.
Your Cartman analogy is way too generous. In real life, we have Bureaucracies which actively fight against attempts to help. And almost no one sees the problem. Certainly they don't want to change that.
And then they bitch about ridiculous cost of things like healthcare, or about Big Pharma - after bravely ensuring there can't ever be Small Pharma, because to sell just a single generic drug, it requires bearing upfront costs of millions of dollars to have a chance FDA will graciously "approve" of selling.
> Unfortunately, “culture of conservation” is nothing more than a nice thought; it would, indeed, be nifty if humanity developed an ethic of environmental stewardship that would mitigate climate change.
Yes. "SOCIETY IS FIXED, BIOLOGY IS MUTABLE"
"See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”"
"Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean."
"And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs."
"On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. (...) the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades"
"Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine."
"What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?"
(hilariously, it seems like we do have good weight-loss drugs now: semaglutide, tirzepatide. Of course, these require prescriptions and there isn't a massive effort to use them to just kill obesity. State actively fights against it. Annoying as hell.)