Marcos, having learned the eutectic diagramme of iron and carbon in my youth, and a lot more about materials, I do indeed recognize the value of commodities such as metals. But that value is to me in what they do in the way of manipulating the four forces of the apocalypse.
Digging them up and burying them again in bank vaults is ridiculous. There's no point in producing something until it's time to use it. Yes, it's good to have inventory to allow for ups and downs in demand, delivery etc, but simply storing stuff for decades is silly.
The Qi is coming along very well. My prototypes are doing okay though they are still models rather than the actual thing.
Trust is the least of my problems with it. That is in fact the greatest strength of it. The problem is to keep the barbarians beyond the pale. Not to mention the small matter of technically delivering, but that's just a lot of work.
Metals and other materials are excellent things, but to help us run our lives, we really don't need tons of metal around us to move our 70kg [which most of the time doesn't really need to move]. I saw a comment from somebody in cyberspace that their vehicle had done 400,000 km or some such in 12 years and I calculated the amount of fuel they had used and it was some vast amount.
Happiness has little correlation with material consumption. In fact, the less that's consumed, the happier people are. For now, in our industrial age 3D world, we do still need lots of stuff, but the amount per happiness unit continues to decrease.
The cyberspace revolution continues apace.
Mqurice |
