Human civilization is at least tens of thousands of years old(just considering what modern man believes) and always valued gold more than anything for both store and exchange of value. I don't see why modern civilization(which were ahead of us in all domains) would feel any different from their ancestors for gold.
Gold as metal has something more than what makes it scarce and valuable, something we have yet to discover. There's a good reason why all central banks of all economies(US,Chine,Russia) are holding on to gold as much as they can and buy/steal more of it as the opportunity arises.
Filtering research grant application based on personal/organizational beliefs is serious thing that can alter understanding of science. Highlighting these problems in application review process is important for public to understand to not to trust research blindly without accessing for any hidden bias.
To me buses and truck market seems niche as compared to personal cars for companies looking to build electric tech to drive them. Number of state departments and businesses willing to pay for electric vehicle are fewer compared to electric car customers.
Trucks and busses often follow centrally planned routes without much deviation, they're too large to be sent down narrow lanes or poorly maintained roads, and the people who buy them are ready to spend a six-figure sum.
Some companies might have autonomous tech that's a good match for those constraints, despite the much smaller market.
And airlines are niche compared to mass market cars too, but they're still a good business!
One thing I think most people don't appreciate is that the switch to self-driving cars will transform America into a mostly-transit society. Once you don't need a car to live from day to day, you sell it. Then you take a self-driving Lyft from your house to the bus depot, train station, or airport.
The market for self-driving busses between cities will grow alongside the market for self-driving cars within cities.
The prediction is that ride-hailing taxis will be ubiquitous and cheap once we have self-driving cars. Companies will be able to flood the city streets with them once they are purely a capital expenditure and they don't have to pay human drivers.
If self-driving taxis are ubiquitous enough, there could be very little wait time between hailing a taxi from an app on your smartphone and the taxi arriving at your location.
At some price point, it will stop making sense to spend $20,000-$30,000 to buy a car. And you won't have to pay for insurance or gas or wear-and-tear or parking. The car could be out making money instead of being parked 22 hours a day.
Businesses and apartments and home developers will stop building parking spaces and parking lots once self-driving taxis hit a sufficient threshold.
Finally, cars will solve transit's "last mile" problem. Instead of paying for a taxi from home to work, you can pay for a taxi from home to the Light Rail station.
I totally agree with your core point. We definitely needs to be more responsible with how we design next generation computing chips. We need to think about power consumption especially in current world where climate change, power/resource shortages are looming large at horizon.
And indeed NVidia placed a big emphasis on how much more power efficient this chip is for its intended workloads than an equivalent CPU based render farm, using less than 10% of the power.
Initial cost might be high but this cost would be slowly return as you save on electricity bills. Also, all this equipment is not perishable and you can still re-sell at good price after your retirement or sell them along with house.
Its no different than investing in house upgrades which adds to the house value.
Longer school days might help kids with stressful home environment but it also poses risk to bonding b/w kids and parents especially for parents who are able to provide and are working towards holistic(moral, etc.) development of their kids. Longer school days should be optional with extra curricular activities to fill the later part of the day.
I completely agree. There are very few paid software for which we don't already have a FLOSS software that can compete with it. Linux users are normally good at finding FLOSS alternatives to paid softwares.
Another thing that author can do is to compare Linux home users sales results with Windows home users for any of their product that is available for both platforms. Sales would be similar as long as Linux and Windows software marketplace for that area is same.
I tried and failed to find a quality git gui for linux, (coming from SourceTree on OSX). I tried a number and they either had awful UI, lacked functionality, or were too buggy.
In the end I ended up paying for a license to GitKraken and am quite happy.
basically using a gui for git is not a good practice. most stuff is cluttered together and hard to find. even in sourcetree, stuff that is important is just not good. (I used sourcetree heavily in the past)
I moved on from graphical git clients and I'm now way more happy and more productive on the cli. the only thing which I would miss on linux is a graphical merge tool, that is as good as kaleidoscope even on windows it's hard to find an equally well tool for the same price (there are good ones, but are way pricier)
I use both gui and command line. Which one varies depending on the task. Quickly checking the working directory state and committing a couple of changes is much easier for me in a GUI. Complicated resets, checkouts, rebases and queries are much easier with the command line.
Edit: I find using a GUI to view the state of a git repo reduces the amount of mental space and energy I need to devote to this information.
"basically using a gui for git is not a good practice. "
That is absolutely silly and completely false. I use SourceTree every day and have no issues whatsoever. I'm just as productive as anyone on the CLI, as 95% of actions are the basic pull/commit/push type stuff.
Gold as metal has something more than what makes it scarce and valuable, something we have yet to discover. There's a good reason why all central banks of all economies(US,Chine,Russia) are holding on to gold as much as they can and buy/steal more of it as the opportunity arises.