It is physically possible to replace petroleum based lubricants with synthetic lubricants created from vegetable feedstocks, it's just not economically feasible in any near term time frame. However what is economically feasible depends on circumstances and alternatives. In a world in which we did this, the circumstances would have to be very different from present.

Imagine a hypothetical world powered by thorium fuel cycle nuclear where electricity was so much cheaper than it is now that it eliminated the use of petroleum for fuel. We'd still be extracting oil for lubricants and plastics, but these materials would be more expensive because the costs of extraction and processing are no longer being paid by fuel users. The high price of lubricants would be OK because we're getting a huge break on energy costs, but that high price would make bioplastics and biolubricants more attractive for research and development.

Such a scenario would happen overnight, it would take decades, but over decades things change so much the familiar becomes unrecognizable.

Well, psychiatrists don't always diagnoses people correctly either, and diagnoses don't really capture what's going on. Neuropsychiatric diagnoses are pragmatic, but often vague and always context-dependent. They do not require people sharing a diagnosis to have disorders with a common etiology.

Take Alice and Bob, both of whom have the requisite six symptoms to get a diagnosis of "ADHD, Inattentive presentation". The thing is, it turns Bob's symptoms are caused by sleep apnea. Since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual does not require the clinician to check for sleep apnea, or even preclude a diagnosis of ADHD for someone known to have untreated sleep apnea, Bob's diagnosis is technically valid. But where Alice is *neurodivergent*, Bob is not.

Now consider Alice's twin sister Charlene. She has exactly the same symptoms as Alice for exactly the same reasons, but she has a creative job that's highly suitable for people with ADHD and a better family situation, so none of those symptoms cause her any distress or impairment. Because there is no impairment, Charlene *can't* be given a diagnosis of ADHD, even though she is neurodivergent in exactly the same way as Alice.

Now there's Erin. She only has *five* of the required six symptoms for "ADHD, Inattentive presentation", so she can't receive an ADHD diagnosis even though she is probably just as neurodivergent as Alice. Finally there's Frank. Frank only has just *one* symptom. You probably wouldn't consider him neurodivergent -- at least not very. But maybe he is; it could be if we could track down the reason for his symptom it would be in a part of his brain that's very weird.

When we call someone or ourselves "neurodivergent", that's inherently speculative because we don't understand the neurological underpinnings of the things we're talking about yet. "Neurodivergent" doesn't really designate any identifiable set of biological distinctions, it's just a genuinely socially useful label we apply to certain people. Where prior generations would try to beat autistic or ADHD behaviors out of people, now we understand those are things a person can't change, but which don't preclude that person from being valuable and productive. I suspect our readiness to apply the neurodivergent label to ourselves and reluctance to let others do the same is just another example of how we're automatically more generous cutting ourselves slack.

But that population isn't underemployed and ready to accept low wages.

This just accelerated a trend that was happening anyway.

One of the genuine accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party was increasing the literacy rate from something like 15% to around 85%. This means when they opened to trade and foreign investment, they had something unique in the history of economics: a vast, literate, and almost entirely under- or un-employed workforce.

But that's changed. In 1990, $500/year would have been a good wage in China. Now the median income is $4600/year -- still a bargain compared to $42,220 in the US. But a Vietnamese and Indian workers are now significantly cheaper than Chinese ones, and while Mexican workers are far more expensive than Chinese ones, their proximity to the US is an offset, as is a more transparent and fair regulatory environment. Mexico also offers foreign investors better legal protections and IP protection. So China isn't the no-brainer place to make something it was twenty years ago.

China has reached a kind of crossroads where they need some kind of transformation. They are stressed and vulnerable, but I don't think they can be strong armed because of the degree of political control the regime has over the populace.

My son is a chemical engineer who has spent his career doing battery and fuel cell research. He's looking at graduate programs in the UK because of the disruption to academic battery research in the US. But if Canada rolls out the welcome mat he'll probably apply to Waterloo or Calgary.

It solves the problem of you giving them your biometric in return for a consideration that costs them nothing.

Don't forget all the researchers who will move overseas to take advantage of research opportunities that have dried up here. France, Germany and Belgium have all started programs to attract researchers away from US universities, and the EU is moving to establish programs to attract American researchers.

This of course is a huge boon to China's ongoing effort to attract science and technology expertise from the US.

The US Molten Salt Reactor Experiment from the 1960s operated at over 7MW, and was also successfully refueled in operation. So without denigrating China's accomplishments with this reactor, they're just reproducing what we already did sixty years ago. But it's a necessary step if there's going to be future progress in thorium fuel cycle technology.

The MSRE wasn't *abandoned*. The experiment finished successfully, with all of its research goals met. It successfully showed that the technology was physically workable. It was never followed up because, at least at the time, the technology wasn't economically viable. Until fission power generation expands to make the supply of uranium a constraining economic factor, the technology probably won't be economically viable. But it's a good that someone is working on it.

Also, with respect to China surpassing France, this has nothing to do with thorium reactors and everything to do that China is 20x the population of France, so everything is bigger. They consume 25x the number of eggs France does too -- but it's because they're larger, not because they get their eggs from super chickens. France gets 63% of its power from nuclear, China gets about 5%. Another way to look at it is that China, with 20x the population, has 1.3x the nuclear generating capacity. About half of China's nuclear generation capacity come from reactors based on a 1980 French design.

But the size of the domestic market and the political commitment to developing advanced nuclear power technology leave no doubt in my mind that China will be the world leader in nuclear power in the coming decades. The thorium research is part of that political commitment, but I don't think it will be of practical importance anytime soon.

If you want to be pedantic, *prisoners* aren't the product of the prison system; necessary services to prisoners are.

In the "free" Internet economy, a detailed picture of your life circumstances and behavioral patterns is the product. In essence, everything about you that might be relevant. It is for practical purposes your digital self.

Because cows are the product, not the customer.

Sure, but that's the economic foundation of all the "free" services you get through the web. They're "free" for the same reason abattoir services are free to cows.

Yes, it's far too early to be measuring the ultimate effect AI will have on employment.

Economic theory and history doesn't point to a single simple, straightforward effect of all productivity enhancing technologies upon employment. Take the automotive assembly line; this was a massive increase in worker productivity, resulting in market prices for cars dropping dramatically and market demand. That increase in demand means that many more people are employed in auto manufacturing than there would be if we still built cars like artisans. But that happy scenario isn't inevitable. It depends on a number of conditions. For example in the very same industry, the introduction of robotics has actually had a negative effect on employment. The difference is that demand was much more price elastic in the early 1900s than in the late 1900s.

For the present, the effect of AI on employment is going to be all over the place, because it will depend on the circumstances. Artists making thumbnails for Youtubers are SOL because YouTubers are super cost sensitive and the quality advantage of a human efforts doesn't enhance their customers revenues. Other artists with customers with needs for higher quality may find more work as their use of AI assistance enables them to offer highly polished results at affordable costs.

As we get closer and closer to AGI, I think the pendulum will swing inevitably toward job loss, but that's not a practical concern in the foreseeable future. In the near term, nobody can make blanket predictions on the effect of AI on employment, other than it will be disruptive.

You seem to be missing the poster's point. He wasn't saying motor vehicles replaced *people*, he was saying motor vehicles replaced *horses*, but that wouldn't have been apparent in economic metrics a decade before the technology became fully practical. AI is still rapidly developing, and it's just not good enough yet to do to people what the tractor did to horses.

Yeah, you'd need some kind of automated computing machine and a large base of data.

Ultimately, what's at stake is potentially exclusive ownership of the foundation for a future post-labor economy. Mark Cuban has speculated that the race to own this technology will produce the world's first trillionaire.

It doesn't even matter if Cuban is right, just the idea floating out there is an irresistibly corrupting influence. Being a billionaire doesn't have any hedonic value over having a measly few tens of millions, it's about power and freedom from consequences. The first AI trillionaire will be on a different level; he'll enjoy economic, political and social power beyond what any human has ever experienced. If he also controls the corporation that controls the technology that replaces the bulk of human mental labor in the economy, he'll be completely untouchable.

Again, it doesn't matter if that's really going to happen, the *possibility* itself will trump all other considerations in the greedy and ambitious. So partnership smartnership. Forget good faith in business dealings, you'll be lucky not to find a dagger in your back, because the stakes here (as being pitched to investors) are Game of Thrones stuff.