On the flip side, accepting this funding has allowed for a lot of research to progress. Sometimes those strings attached still lead to a net good. Obviously, you should always have a plan for "what if this source of funding goes to zero, suddenly", and be prepared to walk away if needs be. But it's hard to imagine what university research would be like if they didn't accept Federal funding. (Much, much weaker, I'd imagine.)
Let's remember that China funds all kinds of research, not just the research with guaranteed profit. (Indeed, private industry already funds research with guaranteed profit.)
There’s a lot of work that is “useful” but the return on investment is not direct, but rather indirect.
For example I don’t remember the detail exactly but this professors insistence to study extremophiles has directly translated to many improvements in medicine.
Every leftist I know believes that education should be free and universally accessible. That holding capital (especially with the intent to make more capital, which is what an endowment is) is morally wrong. And that we should tax wealthy people and corporations to fund things like healthcare and education.
Constructing a strawman like this (inventing a position that progressives do not hold) and then trying to point out the hippocracy in that position is classic logical fallacy territory.
> I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.
Greed. Founders and employees who cannot understand the value of a sustainable business that does one thing well and keeps people employed. We shouldn't seek to grow indefinitely, we should seek to reach comfortable levels of success and then focus our efforts on rewarding the people who are clients and employees maximally.
It sounds like that is the true issue here (which the unit being an Airbnb is exacerbating to be sure). If it was a normal home, and it happened to have owners who were assholes and didn't care about the neighborhood disturbance, you would be in just as bad of a situation (probably worse tbh). The fact that it is being turned over for lots of short term rentals makes it more likely that you'll get asshole tenants there at some point, but ultimately to fix this the people of Toronto would have to pass noise ordinances and make the police enforce them.
I don't think I claimed they did. The cops don't give a shit. But AirBNB cares that the police get called on a property over and over. They'll eventually cut off the owner.
Why couldn't you deploy all those solar panels on earth. Then you could supply the grid when you weren't training models, you could recycle your components when they got old, you wouldn't need launches, you could maintain things if they break, and sure, spend a bunch of money to figure out large radiators that could radiate heat out of the atmosphere.
Be the start of a geoengineering project that is actively collecting energy and radiating it out into space while performing useful work along the way. Infrared radiation between 8 and 13 micrometers isn't absorbed by the atmosphere and exits the planet.
So, why not build big infra here and if you can build powerful radiators, aim them up and away from the earth, which needs to be cooled a bit anyways!
If it paid for people's lives and sustained itself, that sounds like a huge success to me. There's a part of me that thinks, maybe we'd all be better off if we set the bar for success of a business at "sustains the lives of the people who work there and itself is sustainable."
> There's a part of me that thinks, maybe we'd all be better off if we set the bar for success of a business at "sustains the lives of the people who work there and itself is sustainable."
This would be beautiful in a world where retirement was better and it didn’t feel like inflation or financial crashes are looming around the next corner most of the time.
For many folks, trying to get savings and putting money into investments is less about wanting a lavish lifestyle later and more about just wanting financial security in case something bad happens.
I ride a cargo bike through the city, probably 100 miles of commuting through a downtown corridor every week. Pedestrians are basically zero worry relative to cars and people on those rental scooters.
I have an e-assist on mine, so I can absolutely outrun anyone menacing, and biking so much gets you in healthy enough shape that most folks think, "Nah, I'll wait for an easier target." And if that didn't do the trick, pepper spray is a reasonable option.
People on foot are really, really not the worry. Mindless drivers who think they are invincible so they don't pay attention to their environment are FAR more dangerous.
> This idea is absurdly underbaked…other commenters mentioned that it’s going to flip, and it is.
Assuming the rear is loaded with cargo, you'd have a low center of gravity over two wheels. To tip over, one of the rear wheels would need to come up, but that's where most of the weight is.
And I suspect the engineers who built this probably didn't just completely miss "oh wait, what if it tips over!?" Unless you've a) got some experience with this domain and b) got some experience with this bike, I don't know how you could know this bike is going to flip over.
My concern was mostly if the back isn’t heavily loaded.
But you’re probably right overall…if the attachments are expected to be substantially heavier than I was initially thinking, and if the bike were designed to go pretty slow, it’d be ok.
