every anti-Waymo argument is really an argument to ban cars, pt 123124

Anyway you ever think about how much of libertarianism is just creating a framework to allow antisocial behavior by people who want to engage in antisocial behavior?

Right. And we can and should change the culture at state DOTs -- but people don't engage with what that process would look like.

Bad road engineering does increase speeding, but handwaving "engineering fixes" w/o a concrete plan is just drivers fantasizing about not having to change.

My right to privacy in not having the government meticulously record my daily travel patterns is *not* in conflict with my right not to be endangered by reckless motorists.

The question is if we’re willing to meaningfully preserve both rights.

Less abundant than silica but, not "rare" in any meaningful sense of the world -- like, they're common enough that some soil bacteria rely on them metabolically -- it's just they are *dilute as fuck* and so separating them from everything *else* is very difficult (and right now horrendous)

What I'm concerned with is how you get the atoms you need to make the robots, and those methods are still pretty dark ages -- think shittons of strong acids and horrible solvents -- and that's not really a *distributable* problem in the same way....

if working a problem involves several steps where it is very easy to e.g. accidentally condense liquid oxygen out of the air, evolve nontrivial H2 gas, etc, you can't make hands-on work on it a cute activity for middle schoolers....

I see what you're saying, but I think there's a fundamental difference between the problems --

3D printing, you can get started with a relatively cheap-per-person setup, make immediately practical shit, no safety risks to speak of --

this isn't true of lanthanide chemistry!

Like, the other day a friend told me how, when she was first courting her (biologist) now-wife, she asked "so, what is the biggest human cell of which there is a full simulation model?" and how she's very grateful that the relationship lasted past that question -- there is such a *huge* divide here

yeah! I just -- one thing that I find upsetting about ... honestly a lot of perspectives on this -- they are informed by a sort of magical thinking about what is/isn't possible, and people keep saying "we want the work to be done" without any conception of the work is? this is vague, sorry

and robot maintenance is also a tricky problem! Not unsolvable, just, the harder I go into hard tech work, the more I realize the nested layers of unimaginable difficulty.

it's worthy work but we are so far from the end of it

Motors, too. and some optoelectronic sensor stuff IIRC.

I mean I would push back there a little b/c the costs of rare earth elements (both in monetary and environmental terms) aren't going to come down for a minute, and I don't see the necessary robots being built without that, but the energy poverty piece is still absolutely true.