"We also see examples of subcultures or even cults, but again by modern standards they are incredibly tame, and are never potentially destabilizing to culture."
Eh, the "Eaters" cult on the island in "Consider Phlebas" which is definatly a culture citizen cult seems to be quiet extreme- and the AIs do not interfere, even as the obliterate themselves. The AI in look to the windward commits suicide, because it can not escape the memory that makes it who it is- which contains the obliteration of its twin and the humans remaining on orbitals.
The "Eaters" had nothing to do with the Culture - they were on Vavatch orbital which wasn't part of the Culture and which the Culture went on to blow up?
It makes a lot of sense to do district cooling in Singapore, surprised it didn’t happen earlier but laying all those pipes in an existing city can be challenging. Both of the major cities in my metro area have district cooling and heating, and so does the local land grant university.
I don't think that's true actually. Not only do you get fewer parts in total, you also very quickly get to a scale where tracking part wear in detail becomes sensible. Slightly bigger scale and you get essentially 24/7 engineering coverage.
Yes a failure will affect a larger group of people, but it's also much less likely to occur, and much more likely to be fixed quickly.
As a thought experiment imagine everyone running their own privately owned diesel generator. Would that be more reliable than what we have now?
I see where you are coming from, because it’s usually the case that centralizing has economies of scale. The surface area of moving cold air and the damage a missed cold spot causes from condensation or a too-cold spot causes an ice jam seems to be a big materials challenge.
Cities have centralized steam systems for nearly 100 years, so there are probably different sets of challenges with central AC or folks would have figured it out? It might be something along the lines of the heat exchange system would be ridiculously large?
That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
The province of europa is at risk to become the playing-field for a great game.
Then again, it wont give up the learning-disabled dream of the world "society" being reform-able and law-governed. The architect of the Russia-debacle is still president of Germany.
I do believe in the society healing qualities of bankruptcy. Going broke has grounded so many people.
The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
No criticism of you, nor do I want to put words in your mouth, but there seems to be a generalisation to 'all woman' in this argument, and from that an unstated assumption that the only way for humanity to preserve itself is something like artificial wombs/coercion etc. Surely another possible scenario is that the people that aren't interested in having children (or the conditions that make people not want to have children) will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level? Who can say which one of these is more likely?
> [P]eople that aren't interested in having children will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level?
I think this is exactly what we're seeing. This is evolution as a punctuated equilibrium. Nature's last trick "sex feels good (but also leads to babies)" is breaking down in effectiveness on people. Instead, it will be some innate desire to have children that will carry some subpopulation forward. Given the extremely strong selection pressure on (it affects the one life event most determinative of "evolutionary success") this could happen really quickly.
That opens just the next can of worm- with self-selecting for non-rationality in a population. Just letting the thing run its course is basically a eugenics program against rational people. Its basically the enlightenment weeding itself out, which i would find sad, liking the civilization i reside in.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true — people have fewer kids than they desire. Addressing that gap would get us to replacement rate. And obviously, the current rate is significantly non-zero.
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