Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Link roundup

1. "Survey: Game pre-orders on the rise, strongly tied to sadness"

2. "Fixed, The App That Fixes Your Parking Tickets, Gets Blocked In San Francisco, Oakland and L.A."
When Fixed began faxing its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.
3. How would the post-scarcity world of Star Trek actually work? And are some of us already living it?
right now in the United States what used to be the principle occupation of the human race — farming — we are down to 1 per cent of our labour force growing essential nutrients . . ., and we have about three times as many people in our medical and health support professions working to try and offset the effects of excessive calories.

...

in a new industrial state that the standard of living of the average American would be so high that it’s basically only propaganda that would make them want more
4. A related discussion:
When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. … Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat. Air travel is manufactured normalcy. …

This suggests that only those futures arrive for which there is human capacity to cope. This conclusion is not true, because a future can arrive before humans figure out whether they have the ability to cope. For instance, the widespread problem of obesity suggests that food-abundance arrived before we figured out that most of us cannot cope.