> A simpler answer would simply be that, if you lay someone off on the basis that an AI can replace their entire job functionality, you have to keep paying their salary dollar for dollar until they find something else to do.
This just incentivize them to find different official reason for firing. Like missed deadlines (that sudently became shorter) or in computing job code quality (due to reduced deadlines).
> This incentivizes companies to try and figure out creative ways to continue using their existing workforce to maximize the value they get out of AI systems.
This doesnothing for the current issue of job market entry positions, where there is the most pressure from AI. Only help people only in position.
That extra step mean selling what remains at low cost might be more financially interesting than if they could destroy it 'on site'.
Not a perfect solution, but it push the incentives in the right direction.
If the money is use to pay local developer, who reinvest most of it in a taxed local economy, it would need a HUGE amount of devs to match up the government's current MS license cost.
Nuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.
Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun.
The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply.
Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.
There is so much uranium in the ground (in the west too) that it doesn’t make sense to ”keep it” for yourself. Why would Russia wanna keep a supply for the next one million years instead of selling it and get money today? Same with all other countries with uranium.
Regarding known and exploited or rapidly exploitable deposits, we are very, very far from millions of years:
"As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply"
You're forgetting about the supply chain. Who manufactures all the solar panels and wind turbines? Honest question - are we increasing the risks of becoming energy dependent on China? Or does Europe have the ability to manufacture its own?
AFAIK all the raw materials (maybe not all top-notch, especially from the get go, but usable) and all the know-how exist in Europe (at worst currently working abroad), where many nations want to reindustrialize and gain autonomy.
In France numerous projects appear. Some may be too ambitious, some with a Chinese partner. In any case we will re-learn, and it will be less difficult than creating usable uranium without any adequate ore here!
Nuclear power resurgence is bullshit and it will always remain a drop in the bucket, especially for large countries. US has too much natural gas, China too much renewables, Russia well, it's of virtually no economic impact worldwide and whatever they might do is irrelevant (unless they nuke us).
Any country that starts a new nuclear power plant construction today won't finish it before electricity will be comprehensively solved by renewables. It pertains even to dictatorship where public opinion does not exist and there's no red tape (Belarus: 14 years from decision to first reactor start) let alone not in free countries. It puts them into 2040+. In EU let's say there will be certainly no fossil fuel electricity at all, maybe apart from few percents of natgas for prolonged quiet periods in winter, and whatever nuclear power remains will be easy to replace. China? go figure, they have a problem of removing coal generation and that's essentially same as nuclear from standpoint of its behaviour on the grid, and there is so much more coal, nuclear will be squashed simply as a byproduct of whatever solution (which will likely be solar+batteries) they come up with.
Not switching to metric for time is reasonable, because there are already two existing 'natural' units for time (the day and the year), and they don't align on each other in metric (a year of exactly 1000 days would be so much easier, but we'll have to deal with reality as it is... or accelerate the rotation speed of the planet I suppose).
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
Is there any reason they should? Unless the Earth were tidally locked to the Sun, I'm not aware of any reason a day would have any relationship to a year.
It would be convenient to not having to deal with leap days and other such constructs. Of course, we cannot choose how these things behave, and therefore using a calendar not aligned to the natural cycles of our planet would be even less convenient, and would only start making sense when humanity develops into an interplanetary civilization.
The US isn't on a 365.24-based system, either. Days don't fit neatly into years, anyway.
That would have no impact on decimalizing sub-day units: 10 decidays in a day, 2 millidays to cook an egg... But no country did it, which speaks to the power our time traditions really hold in our psyche.
>That would have no impact on decimalizing sub-day units:
part of it is natural. We roughly divide day and night into 2 parts, so we already need to have considerations for halves.
It seems like base 12 was chosen simply due to religion. the zodiac defined the hours at night for ancient egypt, and the Goddesses of Seasons for Greece later on.
Minutes and seconds came because we let astronomers define them based on hours and movements of the sun along a dial. The time it'd take for a dial to traverse a literal arcminute and arcsecond (which is still a thing today). Though these times are very different from today's minutes and seconds. So we have math to thank for the base 60 measurements.
> part of it is natural. We roughly divide day and night into 2 parts, so we already need to have considerations for halves.
I forget which country did it but their historical time system counts hours as two halves from sunrise and then from sunset... That sounds a lot better than noon and midnight, to me. We could totally do
France has its own agency, the CNES (though most research go through ESA nowaday), and had it for a long time.
Its launchers are still the best when it comes to reliability I believe, though not competitive on cost anymore since the advent of spaceX (Ariane6's first flight was in 2024 and its price per kilogram is just an order of magnitude worse than spaceX). Definitely missed a step.
Still, France has an active and ongoing space program since about 1970.
The Ariane family is, at least formally, ESA, not CNES, tho. The UK also has its own agency, but launches via ESA (or private). I think it would be probably fair to say that Ariane is more French than anything else, but it’s not strictly a French project.
Confusingly, the EU also has its own agency, though it doesn’t, as far as I can see, do much outside of operating Galileo. ESA, though obviously very EU aligned, isn’t an EU agency, and has non-EU/EEA/former-EU members (notably, _Canada_).
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