And yet 2023 was the new all time high for carbon emissions, at least until 2024 is in the book. We will not cut emissions until we run out of easily extractable carbon to emit. We’ll be building solar powered pumps for oil wells at some point for the otherwise negative EROI. As a species, we deserve the consequences of our behavior. Too bad they will be most severe for some of the least responsible first.

When everything is Onion-y, nothing is. I see a lot of headlines these days that I wish were fiction/satire.

I don’t believe gibbons can fly, but they should lead with something more relevant like “gibbons are terrestrial as opposed to aquatic apes.” ;)

I am scared of what Google ai thinks of the aquatic ape hypothesis.

I googled gibbons and the Ai paragraph at the beginning started with “Gibbons are non-flying apes with long arms…” Way to wreck your credibility with the third word.

And they expect you to hold their beliefs or stay silent. If you express a contrary opinion, you are the one bringing politics into the discussion. It’s like playing chess with a pigeon.

I imagine that lithography for integrated circuits would be an application, assuming you could make an appropriate photo-resist. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the possible feature size. Current lithography relies on constructive and destructive interference between wavelengths to create super small features.

How has HP not gone out of business? Their products are overpriced pieces of trash.

In the U.S., private companies spend about 5x on drug development than the government. The numbers are probably fuzzier than that though because I don’t think the government spending numbers capture things like grants to graduate students working on drug research.

You spent 2 billion dollars developing a cure for x? I reverse engineered your cure for $30k (or just looked up your formula in your regulatory filings for free), so I can sell the same product for much cheaper than you since I don’t have any development costs to recoup. If you can’t protect your investment, you won’t make the investment.

The problem here is not the patent system. The problem is relying on private for-profit industry to develop drugs. Not enough people get your ailment for a cure to be profitable? Sorry, you are SOL. Also, the current system incentivises developing maintenance drugs over cures. That’s one of the big reasons Type 2 diabetes has met metformin, janumet, glipizide, farxiga, ozempic, etc. All of those drugs are symptom management rather than treatments. A treatment would be a financial disaster for big pharma.

Patents literally are a government granted time-limited monopoly. There are a number of reasons why the government grants these monopolies. Perhaps, the ethics of medical patents should be debated, but if we collectively don’t grant patents on vital medical technologies, then I think it is unlikely that corporations are going to invest billions developing and testing life saving drugs. (Another debate: are private corporations the best stewards of developing this technology.)

For now, this is the system we’ve engineered ourselves into a corner with.

I don’t really care about some blood oxygen monitor in a smart watch, but inadvertently destroying the pharmaceutical industry over it probably ought to be carefully considered.