Interesting. So is the content stored in the tag? Is there more privacy, in the sense that the tag shares the content rather than a username? I wish they had these details.
How about letting the people take the lead in changing the system. It won't be what other countries would like to see, but it will probably be a lot better than the experiments you mention.
It's impossible to do that without favouring one side or another. You could say that 'the people' did take the lead when choosing the rulers of Saudi Arabia or any other country. It just so happens that some people had more money / weapons / power than the others. Is there a way to make things fairer? Well, you could try taking the money / weapons / power from different groups, but then you're making a choice and favouring certain groups to the detriment of others.
That's not how it happened at all. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as a unified state, can be traced to the Treaty of Darin of 1915 between the United Kingdom and Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (aka 'Ibn Saud'). In the treaty, the UK agreed to protect the sovereignty of the House of Saud, and in return Ibn Saud agreed not to attack British protectorates in the Middle East and to support Britain against the Ottoman Empire.
This treaty (and the subsequent Treaty of Jeddah in 1927) legitimized their control over their territory and allowed Ibn Saud to go on to create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
The Arab people had no part in the creation of the Saudi state. It was created by conquest combined with the support of foreign powers (the United Kingdom).
It won't happen overnight and it won't happen in all countries in the short term.
However, Al-Saud family was heavily financed and armed by the British during 1900 onwards. People's allegiences were divided among the Sharif of Mecca Hussain bin Ali, the House of Rashid, the Ottomans, and the Al Saud-Wahhabi alliance. It is not hard to imagine that these forces would have evolved in different ways during industrialization, post-Colonial and Cold War times.
Besides, there have been external forces at play to further or curtail the direction Saudi affairs are going in during the times of King Saud and King Faisal respectively. So it is not as if the people have necessarily chosen the kingdom system of Saudi Arabia while the West has installed democracies.
While not democratic, I think Sharif Hussain of Macca, the Ottomans, and to a lesser extent King Faisal of the Al-Saud would have moved things towards a more representative system. King Faisal's efforts brought women's education to Saudi Arabia and added a little (if only a trickle) to scientific education in some countries in Africa and Asia through student financial aid programs.
So there are various contradictory forces at play locally and globally and nothing stays constant.
Yeah Faisal was relatively "progressive" compared to his peers in the royal family but his successor Khaled was relatively weak and Juhayman Al-Otaibi[1] incident in 1979 freaked the hell out of House of Saud and forced them to run back into the arms of the Wahabis for the fear of losing legitimacy and rule to those then ascending Islamic radicals with their more "puritanical" rhetoric.
It is sort of linked. The working class and middle class will have a better access to meaningful and diverse jobs in diversified free economy compared to a rent seeking one. It will also be in the state's best interest to educate more people for these kinds of jobs in order to grow the economy and keep them off welfare, crime, and violent opposition.
So far the ubiquity of computing power has not had a measurable effect on the mechanisms of aging. Yes, we've made some progress on specific disorders and pathogenic diseases by designing and screening active molecules but it is tangential to the various ways we age.
The gene therapy ideas are similarly in early ages, and if we start hacking away at the various aging mechanisms, it will be well after 2029. Additionally, there are complicated long term effects on tinkering with our machinery. The fact that aging as a natural phenotype is not very diverse means it is pretty complicated. We don't have humans who naturally live to be 200 years old. for example.
Have we been trying? SENS isn't exactly swimming in money and Calico and other ventures are too new to expect results yet. 2029 is probably optimistic, but there's going to be some very motivated tech billionaires in the next decade, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n....
So is there any microwave radiation escaping the cone? If more of it escapes from one side than the other, won't the momentum of the escaping photons (radiation) be the reaction of the thrust produced? Why does it need special physics? I am probably missing something here, but what is it?
So why is it that many industries like software, electronics, finance are all located in the non-expanding, expensive cities? Sure, access to the beaches is nice for recreation and the ocean limits expansion, but surely there can be alternatives?
If the Bay Area won't build/expand, why not develop a hub somewhere that will?
The large demographic trend for the last few decades is that people are moving away from the center and toward the coast. Right now, about 40 percent of the US population lives in a county right on the coast, and that number is sill going up. For a variety of reasons--the industries that held the middle--agriculture and heavy manufacturing--don't employ as many people as before. The centers of media and finance are in port cities. So, in a sense, we don't have a housing problem, we have a distribution problem. The long-term environmental and infrastructure pressures on the coast are going to get worse, and no amount of new housing is going to change that, in fact, it contributes to it getting worse.
So yeah, you'd think there'd be opportunity there for cities to encourage startups and other businesses in need of relatively cheap space, if they can develop the culture and infrastructure needed to support it. Cities that have good academic centers and sources of funding are probably in the best position.
Those industries mainly go to areas where there are large supplies of educated workers. And of course the workers go to where there are large numbers of jobs. It's difficult to start a new hub because neither group will move in large numbers without the other group already being present.
True, it is a chicken and egg problem. However, it can be done, and there are some promising cases to build on like Austin, Salt Lake City etc. The way I see it, there are enough people looking for jobs not already tied down to the coasts who will gladly take a job that pays reasonably well in one of these proto-Hubs.
This is where I'd like to see more innovation. The kind of stuff that takes most of the time and money for most people. Housing, cleaning, food storage, plumbing, transport, security. How come cars, homes, wholesome dinners, home repair, car repair costs more or about the same as 20-30 years ago. We have more and more materials to work with, efficiencies of industrial processes and machines has improved and more stuff is automated. How come the little guy/gal is not getting any of it other than the internet?
In many part of, say the Rust Belt, or many innner cities there are tons of abandoned buildings and houses. If only the repairs and maintenance costs decreased, a lot of people could use them.
>How come cars, homes, wholesome dinners, home repair, car repair costs more or about the same as 20-30 years ago
Cars primarily because cars today have a lot more "stuff" in them--in many cases, safety related. Although I'm not sure given improved reliability that the $/mile cost isn't less
I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of some fresh food has dropped but it's probably not a lot cheaper across the board. Mechanized farming has been around for a long time.
Home and car repair are largely a function of labor. There's relatively little benefit in either case to improved industrial processes. The process of building a house hasn't changed much and manufactured housing has never really taken off for a variety of reasons.
Completely agree baltcode, as amazing as teslas and iphones are homes are the center point for everything else. There is a huge housing crisis and it effects much more of the economy, environment and community than most people realize and I can't help but feel like there is much more innovation to be had on this front!
The problem you run into is that housing (the land, really) is both a useful object and a rather solid investment. It's that dual functionality that makes it a different problem from disposable objects (iPhones and cars, as examples). Very few cars or phones are purchased as investments directly (meaning you see the value appreciate). Housing is almost exclusively an investment, both for finances (whether collecting rent or being able to leverage the value down the road) and for the land it sits on.
A world where most housing becomes disposable (i.e. it is not directly tied to the land it sits on) would be very different from the one we currently live in.
True, though I'd like to understand it on deeper level. For example, how much of a house or condo price due to the land and how much of it construction, maintenance, taxes?
In any case, at least for building straight up, there is scope for improvement even with the land remaining a bottleneck.
It varies enormously although there tends to be some correlation between the size and cost level of the house and the price of the land it's on. Someone's probably not going to buy a million dollar parcel of land and put a shack on it (even if they were allowed to by zoning--which they probably wouldn't be).
The general rule of thumb is $100-200 a square foot for houses so a fairly typical 2,000 square foot house is going to probably cost in the neighborhood of $300K to build. That assumes the land has water, electricity, sewer/septic, etc.
So for fairly typical exurb/suburban locations (i.e. not Bay area, Manhattan, or back of beyond), the house and the land are probably roughly the same value.
"A world where most housing becomes disposable (i.e. it is not directly tied to the land it sits on) would be very different from the one we currently live in."
Didn't we have an article on HN talking about Home Depot and how Japan's houses are basically disposable? Still tied to the land, but torn down and new build instead of home improvement.
One variation is the campground model. I have a camper parked at a fairly decent campground, costs are about 2.5K a year (plus electricity and waste disposal). But where I live the camping season is about 5 months. However, it doesn't have the feel of a trailer park -- instead if feels like a resort area.
Yes. In urban areas housing is, almost by definition, not affordable any more. Yet there's still a cultural stigma coming from living in mass-produced housing like trailer parks or high-rise projects like the late unlamented Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.
Just because le Corbusier's brutalist mid-20th-century vision gave urban manufactured housing a multigenerational bad name doesn't mean the whole project is stupid.
I wonder if Habitat for Humanity or some other experienced org with an ethical core could have something to add to this project.
