Comments by "" (@timogul) on "Joe Scott" channel.

  1. I always feel it's important to point out that the future of automation is not android frycooks standing at the frier, it's just a factory-style kitchen that moves ingredients to cooking stations and then to the customer in ways that have nothing to do with how humans would do those tasks. It's not "the robot capable of doing everything a human can do, and then being told to cook french fries," it's just "a system that does not require human intervention to produce french fries."
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  2. If they wanted to do an underground hyperloop, they would likely still need to line the tunnels with metal. It would be basically the same thing as the above ground version, just with more reinforcement from the ground outside it, less temperature variation, and less chance of impact breakage. On the flipside, any damage that did happen to part of the tube would be harder to repair and would need to be done from the inside. It'd still be impractical, just a bit less so.
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  3. I think that in less than 100 years, we will not just lose 30% of jobs, but 99.99% of jobs. Pretty much anything a person can do, a machine will be able to do cheaper, so the only people with jobs will be those at the absolute peak of the food chain. Those people wouldn't be technically necessary either, but since they would be in control of what gets done, they would likely insist on retaining their own jobs. Capitalism has worked fine through the 20th century, but if allowed to proceed unchecked, there would become absolutely no reason for those at the top to even CARE about anyone other than themselves. They could just live on private estates someplace, supported by 100% mechanical industry, and let the rest of the world's population go to rot. So that's plan A, and I'm not a fan. Plan B would have to involve some degree of "welfare," some sort of "income as a basic human right," rather than paying people for the amount of benefit they bring into the world. It would not be paying people for their effort, because their effort would be pointless in the machine age, it would just be paying people because to do otherwise would be inhumane. I don't believe in a resource-less economy because while it might take care of everyone's basic needs, every person is different, every person will value different things over others. People might only have a fixed amount of water that they "need" in a day, but those who prefer long showers might want the option to pay extra out of their allowance to get more water than most, at the expense of having less new clothes, or less fancy food, or whatever matters to them slightly less. I think there needs to be some way of tracking trade-offs, so that each person can adjust their life experience to best fit their tastes, without anyone taking more out of the system than anyone else (this is assuming that we still have any degree of scarcity that would require any level of moderation).
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  4. It seems like the best value on this one could be as a platform for testing technologies that could hopefully be scaled up. If you could build a plane the size of a 747, or even 1/2 or 1/4 that size, that can use these sorts of efficiencies, that could be a game changer.
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  5. I know "because magic" is an unsatisfying answer, but it certainly could be an issue of "because magic AND science." Think of it this way, there are the White Walkers and all those up in the north, right? So perhaps the natural cycle there is a relatively normal Earth seasonal pattern, but when there are periods in which the White Walkers are "feeling powerful," they naturally lower the temperatures up there by only a few degrees, and that could create a natural climate cycle like the Atlantic Conveyor, which then transports colder weather down to the lower parts of the globe. the result would be that "natural winters" would become even colder, and "natural summers" would be suppressed to the level of just "a slightly pleasant January day," until this magical ice-box effect settled down, at which point natural seasons would resume. And perhaps since they typically have particularly long summers in the first place, maybe their "natural winters" would be a lot milder than in most of America, more of a "California winter." Now the scariest aspect of this is, what if these periodic magical cold snaps were necessary to maintaining a balanced climate, and that without any White Walkers to occasionally cool things off, the climate would actually get warmer and warmer over the next few centuries, until everything becomes uninhabitable?
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  6. Just to brainstorm a flow battery car, why not combine flow and normal batteries? Have a small scale LI battery that can be used to "super boost" the car, allowing for high acceleration, but use the flow battery for low acceleration situations. The LI battery could even be charged by the flow battery. That shouldn't be too hard to manage if the tech works. And as for fueling stations, they wouldn't need new fuel piped in, at least not in huge volumes, because you'd be "trading" fuel. You'd be pumping charged fuel into the car, yeah, but you'd also have to pump spent fuel out of the car, and the fueling station could recharge that spent fuel to make it fresh again. You'd be trading their ability to constantly pump electricity off the grid for the car having to store energy on the go. They might lose some total fuel over time, but would need to be topped off much less often than a gas station.
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  7.  @robertrynard7397  Possibly. It really mostly does depend on how cheaply a functioning android can be produced, but I kind of have the feeling that most major industrial automation will take place before "affordable androids" are on the market. Another factor here is industrial consolidation, like mom&pop stores becoming Walmarts becoming Amazon warehouses, a hundred stores in one. Likewise, restaurants will likely consolidate, like a KFC/Tacobell, so that a single facility with a single largely automated kitchen could service a dozen drive-through windows and fill the needs of every fast food customer within 10-20 miles, and the food would be just as good as we get today. At least, they could be.
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  8.  @robertrynard7397  The problem though is that most businesses already pay below the living wage for lots of low-skill labor jobs, which means that the state is already picking up part of the cost of keeping those workers alive. So the question is, would it be in the best interests of the state to jack up minimum wage to a livable wage, so that everyone who works 40 hours a week can survive on that labor alone, even if that means that businesses would cut half or more of their current low-skill employees and automate them? Or would it be better to continue to allow businesses to pay a poverty wage so that they employ as many people as possible, even if the state is actually covering most of their living expenses and they are basically working for no good reason? Personally I feel that if a robot CAN do a job, then it is better for everyone involved that the robot do the job and that the human find something else to occupy his time, while his needs are met either way. Require that every job pay a living wage or nothing, but that the profits of getting rid of employees would be offset by a higher tax burden. And I mean a lot of this is already happening, Taco Bell just came out with a two story, four drive-in bay test store in California that can pump through customers. It's currently got a standard human staff, but a building like that would be much easier to "factory-ize" than a standard one. And plenty of grocery and online retailers have built their massive warehouse systems with some variety of bot that moves products around the place, and all the humans do is pick up the item at the end of the chain and put it in the shipping box, a step that would be easier to automate than a general android. You don't even have to replace every human, but right now, you could either have 100+ small stores in a town that each carry niche goods, run by 250+ employees over the course of a week, OR you can have one big box online warehouse delivering the same products to the same customers, and it would only require a dozen or two humans managing a bunch of automated processes.
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  9.  @robertrynard7397  Well, like a modern grocery, they have automated teller machines that people use themselves instead of a human-run checkout lane. That allows a dozen customers to check out with only one human monitoring the situation, instead of at least 3-4 tellers to manage the same customers in the same time, and there is still room to scale that situation up. Conversely, a modern grocery post-covid often allows online curbside pick-up, in which you pick the foods you want, then a human worker wanders the shelves with a cart, picking items then sending them out front for pick-up. A humanoid robot could do this, but it would be inefficient. The more efficient system would be to just skip the store entirely and just ship directly from a warehouse sized space, where non-humanoid robots roam the shelves. Even inside a grocery store, it would be less efficient to have a biped humanoid robot pushing a cart, than to have a cart-shaped robot, like a giant R2-D2, that roams the aisles and picks out the items people have ordered. Designing a factory process to do a thing does take some development work, but for a multi-billion corporation, you only have to do that work once, and then make minor tweaks over time to change menu items. The time and cost this would take would be equivalent to the training time spent on human workers. This doesn't mean that every McDonalds would switch to automated over night, but it does mean that some of the new McDonalds being built would be, and then over time as old ones are closed or remodeled anyway, they could choose to invest in a couple hundred thousand in new kitchen equipment, to offset half a million a year in staffing costs over the next 10+ years. If you're going to be buying new kitchen components, then buying ones that can work themselves would not cost that much more than buying the normal kind, and less than buying the normal kind AND a handful of humanoid robots to operate them.
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  10. Shhhhh! Move north first, and then drive down Texas property values!
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  11. If we do hit the point that making new batteries is cheaper than recycling, then it would likely only be temporary (until the easy resources run out), so the solution would be to stockpile the dead batteries in a place that they're easy to get at, so that once that bubble bursts, they can come back and start recycling again without too much hassle.
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  12. I was thinking, a good way that we could get Russia to play ball on grain shipments is missiles. Or lack of missiles. Recently we started sending Ukraine these HIMAR missiles that are really cool, and have a range of 50mi. We plan to keep sending more. But we also have OTHER missiles we can give them with a range of almost 200 miles. Russia probably wants to avoid that. So why don't we make a deal with Russia? They let Ukraine trade grain completely in peace, leave Odessa completely alone, or else the instant they screw that up, we start sending Ukraine the longer range missiles.
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  13. I think the future of machines is less in "androids," and more in just factories and server farms that are designed to not need humans or human-looking anything. I don't imagine we'll have human-looking androids working behind McDonalds counters, instead we'll just have McDonalds that are mini-factories, with nothing in the kitchen being designed for a human to operate, but rather for it to carry the food from fridge to packaging in a series of assembly-line steps, and to the customer, it would just be a matter of either using a touchpad, mobile ordering, or voice recognition to place an order, and then pick it up as if from a complex vending machine. I think most things will be like that, and humanoid robots will mostly just be for things like social interaction purposes.
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  14. "Why do we keep bouncing from one crisis to another?" Because some people continue to vote for Republicans.
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  15. The Chinese said "may you live in interesting times." Americans say "MY time is the MOST interesting time!" Everyone wants to believe they are special and essential to history. Almost everyone is wrong.
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  16. The US has had our own station since the 90s, we just let other people stay there too.
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  17. I thought it was a cool idea, but I have to admit that the "vacuum depressurization" issue stopped my hype dead. I just don't see a way around that. It just seems like one of those idea that sounds good on paper because it would work in a perfect world where everything worked perfectly all the time, but it completely implodes (literally) if even tiny, inevitable things go wrong. I think they should just focus on more standard mag-lev trains that would be cheaper and more efficient, while still being plenty fast.
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  18.  @paulshields1883  Only if it happens far enough from the carriage to dissipate. Even in the best case, it would cause massive damage that would shut down large chunks of the line for a significant amount of time. It's the sort of thing where if you really put a ton of effort into redundancy and foolproofing it and that sort of thing maybe you could make it work, but the effort to do so would never be worth the returns, relative to what you could accomplish putting that same effort toward more practical technologies. Like to make a reliable hyperloop would probably cost more to build and maintain than having ten times as many miles of more reliable and extremely fast high speed rail alternatives.
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  19. I feel like your more regular viewers tend to enjoy the "oddball" stuff like the mystery man video, but "cataclysm!" videos tend to attract more views from casuals, people who just see a thumbnail and click.
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  20. Never-EVs: "EVs use colbat, which is mined in awful ways." Us: "Yes, that's why we need to buy more of them, so that there is more demand for cobalt, forcing more responsible mining practices.
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  21. My dad went to a one-room schoolhouse in the 1940s and 50s, rural PA.
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  22. OMG, you've got a tiny UFO in your basement! It's doing something to your lightbulbs!
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