As long as hydrogen is (ignorantly) banned, airships will never make a comeback.
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, using hydrogen as lifting gas, flew 1.7 million km safely. [1]. Built in the 20's, without polymers or hydrogen sensors or electronics of any kind.
The real problem, however, is not the lifting gas. It never was. Airships biggest nemesis is the wind. Luckily we have it solved today with radar and satellite imagery.
What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech?
Remember when all these corporations banned Trump at the same time?
Imagine not being able to buy from Amazon when there is no retailer left.
Imagine not being able to listen to music or watch movies when all of it is only available through streaming.
What about having all your email deleted because a Google bot flagged your account.
Or being shadow banned in social media, having no impact on any discussion.
And what was the purpose of said law again?
If i increase the price of cars by a 1000x, am i not deciding who gets to buy and then use one? I'm making it harder to buy cars with the intention of less people using it, just like carbon taxes and the like.
There is only a small number of good mechanisms (such as the one you pointed out) in the world. In today's world this is a problem. People and groups of people need to bring something different to the "table" in order to get or stay relevant. In essence, every now and then people have the worst of incentives to pump and hype some exotic technology in order to secure that good old government money.
It is a race to the bottom nevertheless. While on one side minimum wage is pushed higher, on the other technology gets cheaper. Eventually even burger flippers will find themselves out of a job.
An elevator can be considered a purely mechanical, not-social thing.
Traffic can have a social aspect to it, most of us do not really care and consider it too to be a not-social thing.
My point was more about what happens when we take things with social aspects and start to think of them as purely "mechanical" things. At that point having a human do activity "X" will appear dumb, like having a human control an elevator today. Could we still call this future world a society, since there is nothing social about it? Essentially we will dehumanize everything, and to me it seems sad.
What is your opinion on the societal effects of this lack of trust? This default trust on computer systems undermine trust in other humans. How can we hope to live in a community we do not trust? Why would i take into consideration X opinion on foreign trade if this "computer" thing is likely to be less wrong?
Conspiracy? Their point is compliance. Do what you are told without questioning it, be it government policy or corporate wish. People did nothing after 2008, they did nothing after proof of government mass surveillance, and they choose not to care what software runs in their devices on a daily basis. 50 years ago no one would even consider installing a microphone in their houses, now those that refuse it are seen as the paranoid. Current generation will not even bat an eye if their cars required them to watch an ad before turning on.