But in all seriousness I can't imagine all the layers of un-elected, unaccountable bureaucratic petty power centres a mere elected official would have to navigate to get anything done in London.
It's the same in all westminster democracies - I'm from New Zealand and it's projected to take 10 years to make a 3.5km/2.2mi underground rail tunnel in our largest city. Let's be optimistic and say it's only 4 years late - that'd be a bit over half a yard/metre of tunnel per day.
I just don’t understand the answer. Seems to be conflating “energy cost” and “financial cost” under the same umbrella. I don’t think Prometheus is disputing the energy costs of “the physics required to assemble a molecule”.
Current processes use heat+pressure, which are pretty wasteful, and often rely on burning fossil fuels in the 1st place, which will mechanically increase the financial cost”
What I understand from Prometheus is that they have a different way to “assemble molecules”, which relies on “electrocatalysts” instead of “catalysts requiring high temperature and pressure”. On the face of it, I can totally see how such a catalyst would decrease the “financial cost” without necessarily impacting the “energy cost”. It’s simply using a cheaper energy than the current processes.
The twitter answer rings similar to someone who would say “There is no shortcuts around the physics of producing light” to justify why LED lightbulbs would never make it. Most of the energy of incandescent bulbs is just heat, and there are physical process that produce light without all that heat. I don’t see any reasons why the extra heat would be needed to produce fuels
What about the effects of 'time spent on the problem' (ie compounding)? If you are only learning for learning sake, then getting to a "101" or "102" or "103" (to use American college level terminology)is fine I would assume. This might take 1-3 years of learning/study/doing.
But if you truly want to "master" something - then does "constantly thinking about problems" mean you will never benefit from the same 'compounding' effect as someone who has spent 3/5/10 years of their time on that problem?
Or - is all your "need for cognition" - mostly in one domain space (e.g. "Computer Science" or "database structure" etc)?
Also see previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (2017) - (1) and (2).
As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens (mainly water but but not much other nutrients or carbon), but much harder for other plants.
See this video [3] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)".
A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[4]).
What are some high-calorie/nutritional value plants that work well in vertical farming? Maybe if those were grown cheaply enough people would adapt their recipes to incorporate them.
CBW Bank - founded by an-Ex google engineer and an ex-Wall Streeter has been doing this (created a bank from bottom
Up - including purchasing an actual bank and creating the software) geared towards startups) since 2014. Don’t know how well they are doing now.
But they wouldn’t have had the in-built In go-to-market strategy, or the prestige/visibility in the funding community, of a YC Alum.
