Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.

By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.

Government employees are going to take over the farms and grow all the food? That’s not a market economy.

Furthermore if all that stuff is free then why are people still working?

Who is going to do all the work to make all that stuff if it’s free?

There’s no amount of money everyone can make that’ll get us all to stop agonizing over bills. Sure, billionaires today generally don’t have that worry but that’s only because they’re richer than everyone else! If everyone was a billionaire then you’d be spending billions to pay your bills.

What would make everyone happy is to achieve post scarcity as a society. The problem with that is that we’d then simply grow in population until scarcity came back. We’re never going to have infinite resources so that will always be possible.

There’s plenty of research that shows people are happier when they earn more money than their coworkers. Absolute quality of life improvements don’t translate into happiness nearly as much as we’d hope.

What are basic resources though? All people ever want is more. More than they had yesterday. More than the guy next door. More than Timmy whose parents took him to Disneyland in 3rd grade.

And land value taxes work on both. I mean, unless he wants to live on that yacht and not own any mansions of course. But the land value tax is still going to get him (indirectly) when he pulls into the marina.

That’s a consequence of capital gains tax being structured the way it is.

I think one of our biggest issues as a society is the way we try to use tax to target specific people. It never works out! They just find ways around it.

We should be trying to set up a tax system that’s very simple, straightforward, and easy to enforce, such as land value taxes.

He said live and neutral were reversed. The ground connection to the chassis was correct though!

And then of course you have those rare issues where the fault is actually dangerous! Just a few years ago I called an electrician to my house because the breaker for the laundry room light fixtures was tripping every time, so I suspected a short. The electrician who showed up (hell of a guy, loved to chat!) said the ceiling light fixture was wired incorrectly and the housing was live! A quick and easy fix for him but anyone changing a lightbulb on that socket over the past 30 years was risking a shock!

Of course this is only 120V AC so not the deadliest thing in the world, but it’s always fascinated me that a fault can go unnoticed for many many years and still pose a hazard. It’s kind of like WW2 munitions or something, but completely unintentional!

Right, but then a CEO like Jensen Huang already has a paycheque to cover that sort of thing.

The question is what is it really like to have your stock holdings go from $5 billion to $120 billion as a result of the company you run getting caught up in the AI hype bubble? Honestly I think not much. Just a number changing on the computer screen, like a new high score in an arcade game.

How much do I think it affects his daily life? Pretty much not at all. Yet if it went back down to $5 billion people would be screaming at the company and he might be fired. It’s very strange!

That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?

Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.

The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!

Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.

They can’t do anything with it, even if they wanted to. Trying to sell $120 billion worth of stock will cause the price to crash. Plus since he’s an officer of the company he has to go through a bunch of reporting requirements and basically announce the stock sale well in advance. Announcing that you’re going to sell $120 billion of the stock, without providing a strong reason, is just going to cause investors to believe you think the company is in trouble and drive the price down before your stock sale goes through.

Yeah. High chargebacks and fraud (both actual fraud and fraudulent fraud reports) on adult content. I think a lot of it has to do with the “spouse factor.”

That or the alien will simply scour all life from the planet and then strip mine it for resources. They don’t even have to be more intelligent than us. Suppose they were roughly equivalent to human intelligence but had an insect-like eusocial behaviour with a billion year old culture. They could be far more advanced than us simply due to the availability of time.

Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.

Another thing to note is that the episiotomy itself is no longer a recommended procedure for routine births. The incision lengthens recovery time and brings complications of its own.

So make it a one time only thing then? Next billionaire you have in the dock will know you can’t be trusted to keep your word (“return the money and your life will be spared“) and so will have zero reason to cooperate.