Excellent book. I also recommend his recent "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours". It really makes you wonder to what extent our law may be in a local minimum.
Very interesting video of Brian Beckman talking through some of the differences between airplane simulators and racing (car) simulators and why tires are harder:
Flying cars are interesting because they have the potential to partially make obsolete the natural monopoly of roads. Governments are heavily involved in natural monopolies (possibly for good reason) but I worry that that involvement may crowd out innovative private organizations that would otherwise have the incentive to bypass the natural monopoly. I wonder what other innovations are being stifled in the same way.
As far as flying cars go, they sure are loud. But cars are fairly noisy as well -- in cities the roads are often very close to apartment buildings.
GPS and LEO satellite internet are very different. GPS is meant to be received by near-omnidirectional antennas anywhere on the planet. Starlink satellites will place multiple spot-beams acting as cells and customer receivers are high directional as well.
Jamming Starlink would require satellite tracking and high gain antennas. And you would have to have separate jammers for each spotbeam that the starlink satellite casts on the ground.
If we held satellite operators liable for damages from collisions, they may be incentivized to acquire insurance against collision events. And underwriters would incentivize satellite operators to reduce that risk by giving lower premiums to operators that use collision avoidance systems like drag sails and/or propulsion.
The trick of switching the implementation of owning_ptr and constraint_ptr based on a compile flag is very neat.
Is there any risk of the compile flag influencing which object owns the reference, and therefore causing a kind of "heisenbug" where it doesn't crash during the safe mode but still has dangling pointers in the fast mode?
I figure, the elderly will need to get groceries somehow. It's a question of what is more sanitary: going to the grocery store or having groceries delivered.