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Solve education. Use the results to solve food & energy.
by cagenut 15y ago
Solve education. Use the results to solve food & energy.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoenergy is solved. http://www.energyfromthorium.com/history.html http://www.energyfromthorium.com/history.html potable water is solved as a side effect of thorium reactors. food was solved by the Bosch-Haber process, it's a matter of distribution now.
- pstuart 15y agoAlmost. There's the little trick of getting establishment buy-in.
- ugh 15y agoPolitics and engineering are not the same.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoI have some nice beach front property to sell to anyone thinking they're going to solve a political problem.
- ugh 15y agoTons of political problems have been solved in the past†. If politics were incapable of solving problems society wouldn’t exist. It’s just that you can’t go about solving political problems like you would go about solving engineering problems. That’s all. †A few examples of relatively targeted efforts to achieve set political goals: - Women’s suffrage in the UK and other countries - Abolishment of the death penalty in France and other countries - The civil rights movement in the US Those are all high-profile examples but solving problems in a way that doesn’t cause chaos or disasters is one of the core tasks of any political system.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoall of those resulted in awful outcomes to go with the good. political problems don't get "solved". differing groups get pushed around around over time. the overall amount of pushiness monotonically increases.
- ugh 15y agoThat’s an awfully cynical view. Problems remain, politics is tedious and sometimes mindbogglingly irrational but, looking back, humanity has made progress and there are countries in the world that are better at this stuff and some that are worse. No one serious – and certainly no large portion of the population anywhere in Europe or North America – demands women’s suffrage to be taken back. I’m not sure how to interpret that in any other way as seeing clear progress (if my goal was to enable women equal participation in politics). But that’s not really all that important to the point I was trying to make. Politics requires a different sort of mindset compared to engineering (as does, for example, PR or marketing), you don’t solve problems (or better: achieve goals – “problem” is such an awfully loaded word) the same way.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoI think it is wise to be cynical about zero sum games such as status and government and optimistic about positive sum games. as for achieving goals, many of the "conflicts" fall away when you directly consider the goal of increases in standards of living for all sectors of society rather than an endlessly manipulated parade of sub goals. If aliens came to earth and you told them about our problems, they'd probably first ask why everyone isn't studying the regions with the highest standards of living.
- whatusername 15y ago"Energy is solved" in the sense that it looks like most of the hard engineering problems are dealt with and that it conceptually works. It likely needs anotehr $B or two in R&D before it's completely viable.
- mseebach 15y agoEnergy production is mostly solved, but storage and transportation aren't, and those are incidentially the areas where oil and gasoline excels.