Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media.
If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.
Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.
They could state "Some of the content in the following paragraph is sponsored by Apple:" and then weave it in. Edit: but still have vital content in the paragraph, like product placement in movies.
From the start, if we think in realpolitical terms, we let him effectively keep Crimea and Donbas/Luhansk without giving the Ukraine material support to take them back, out of the fear of pouring fuel into the fire.
Putin had demands that were de facto impossible to fulfill, they read as if the US/European governments had power over e.g. the desires of the inhabitants of the Baltic states. They all wanted into the EU/NATO after the Cold War for reasons that aren't hard to empathize with.
In a security-political sense, making concessions that impact your weakest allies is a surefire way to destabilize your own alliance.
Also, why do we have to make concessions in terms of Ukraine and guaranteeing that Ukraine won't join EU/NATO? Putin should have been talking to Ukraine about that and giving concessions to Ukraine in exchange for staving off any alliance memberships - but it's now clear why he didn't.
I would add binoculars in general are pretty amazing - putting the distance between optical elements of a refracting telescope into a small ergonomic package.
The change is already there, prefab build techniques lead to construction companies keeping everything in-house - from crane operators to plumbers. The building is split into parts that can be built in-house and then assembled on-site - the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible, since that makes you more independent of weather for finishing it. Especially for warehouses and facotries it's really impressive.
It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.
Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...
After reading up a bit more I think I was too hasty with that statement. Getting a practical solar capacity is quite a lot cheaper than I imagined for many latitudes.
Because it's not a car that is not armored and just looks like a stealth fighter.
And because it's not a car that is armored and looks like a regular car.
It seems to me people like the martial aesthetic and function(!) as a status symbol, maybe without reflecting why the martial aesthetic is what it is. To keep people in a metal shell with guns on it from being shredded.
A civil society should find these things ugly but respect their necessity, not celebrate them. And if civil society has a real need for these things, it's in a sad state.
I think it's sad though that people want to have an armored car that looks like a stealth fighter.
It's also strange that you can sell it in a context of 'being prepared', with the offroad capability and everything - I don't know a better example for a vehicle being dependent on an always-on infrasructure than an armored electric truck.
I think there is some cost issue in making the car armored. With a sandwich material it would be way more feasible to put together planar cuts than to cold form them. Armor usually is pretty stiff.
If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.
Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.