> It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
The military has significantly different incentives.
Even just consider banks and e-commerce. They are hugely lucrative and making them even a tiny bit less accessible directly impacts their revenue. As an example, Amazon seeing that latency has a measurable effect on purchase behavior.
Maybe the military (fictional or otherwise) can go back to the ARPANET but most economic activity created by the internet cannot afford to disconnect
In the real (fake?) world the toasters would shoot smart dust all over your crap that would assemble back on your circuits creating radios between all the different components. They were fighting an adversary that was far more advanced than them.
> Just showing how RNA or amino acids arise, says nothing about any genetic system. They can not even answer whether RNA or DNA viruses existed first; and whether these existed before organisms/cells did.
Actually, we have quite a bit of evidence to evidence pointing at the order of development based on how strongly conserved some critical features of biochemistry.
The core component of ribosomes (which make proteins) is made from RNA called ribozymes. Other things like RNase P, self-splicing introns, the RNA cores of the spliceosome, and the fact that most central metabolic cofactors (ATP, NAD, FAD, coenzyme A) have ribonucleotide handles points to RNA as the initial building block, before viruses or archae or prokaryotes were even born.
It wasn’t until ribonucleotide reductase gets involved that RNA becomes DNA. DNA swaps uracil for thymine making the genome more error-resistant and a double helix to get stability over reactivity, as a clear evolutionary strategy because DNA doesn’t form like RNA does.
The core of the RNA world hypothesis is a ton of experiments that find that RNA and amino acids are stable in many different chemical conditions which cover a wide range of what the early earth would have looked like along with observed amino acids on outer space objects like comets and asteroids. What we don’t have is an experiment demonstrating how RNA becomes self replicating with the addition of amino acids, which would be one of the last steps to showing how life likely formed.
I don’t remember the last time I had to wait more than a few days to see a GP or more than a week for a specialist on an employer’s PPO insurance plan. I’ve had them at several employers ranging from university to FAANG so it’s not exactly something only fabulously wealthy people have access to.
The problem is there is a huge bathtub curve in insurance quality between employers and the public market. It’s a rude awakening when you can’t afford COBRA rates and have to fall back to a “bronze plan” or whatever is available on the exchanges.
FAANG employee health insurance? Something like 1% of American workers get that, if even that many. Then throw in my oil company friends here in Houston and a few other industries which give premium benefits and you still have a tiny subset of the American workforce getting exceptionally strong benefits. Not at all indicative of the experience of most Americans.
The universities I worked for (both public and private) provided the same level of PPO insurance, as did a random fitness startup, a clinical diagnostics company, and a construction company. I invite you to reread the part where I said “several employers [plural] ranging from university to FAANG”.
Here in Houston, my friend who works at UH has excellent insurance. A quick search online confirms that it is much better than average. Different structure for employees at Rice, my alma mater, but still excellent. Gemini describes these employees being in a kind of "benefits bubble" here in Texas, and they're getting something way better from what most Texans get.
You said FAANG, so perhaps you're in California, a state that has laws regulating health insurance to an extent that make it unique in the USA?
> You said FAANG, so perhaps you're in California, a state that has laws regulating health insurance to an extent that make it unique in the USA
That is definitely a confounding factor, although I’m curious how much of that is the urban vs rural split in other states. (The construction company was not in California but oil boom-town adjacent in Texas)
On the other hand, most states with significant tech workforces have Medicaid which most people will qualify for if they're laid off (I did!) and these are excellent. People pay for cobra despite a public option being available.
Part of ACA was the creation of regional health cartels. If you’re in a region with shitty networks, care may be hard to get. Where I live there’s a teaching hospital with a doctor focused medical network and a big Catholic hospital chain.
In my scenario, There is a good market for cardiac, OB, and some other specialties in each network. The rest is a monopoly— the catholic network doesn’t staff neuro for example, they just have consultants.
> I always wondered what held them back from building a meaningful networking business in the US.
It was just timing. Their networking gear was built on some very impressive ASICs which became commodity chips a few years later before they could grow. Arista, Juniper, et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP. IIRC it was Broadcom and Fulcrum that released the chips that killed them.
> Geopolitics is a complex subject I suppose, for a layman like me.
It helps to be familiar with realism in international relations theory starting with Machiavelli and Hobbes, and postwar realism which developed over the Cold War. The ethics have been debated for centuries and the mainstream interpretation is that leaders have a fiduciary obligation to the population they are responsible for, which fundamentally changes ethical considerations.
It’s a completely different moral question when you’re responsible for a billion people, many of whom may suffer or die due to the cost of fuel. It is in principle a violation against their own people for Indian leaders to prioritize Ukraine’s people over their own.
Admiral Adama says otherwise.
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