Libra00

My point is that whether you send down divers or haul 400+ tons of concrete and equipment up from the bottom of the ocean, it’s going to be expensive to maintain either way, especially if things don’t go according to plan and they have to perform maintenance more than once every 20 years or whatever.

No one gets thanks for being a decent human being, it’s sort of the standard that everyone is expected to hold to.

They could. But you and I both know they won’t because most people don’t care about anything beyond ‘make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.’

I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.

Don’t. Even if it’s not a cult (it totally is) it’s a scam designed to extract money from people. If you just want to give up a significant portion of your money and feel like you belong you’re welcome to buy a shitload of weed and come hang out with my friends and I.

Yeah, so instead of sending down divers with equipment you’re hauling hundreds of tons of concrete out of the sea, which means aside from a ship and crew which you’d need anyway you’re still going to need specialized equipment (some big honkin’ chains and winches at a minimum) and tools and such, and that stuff isn’t cheap either. Also they’re aiming at a 20 year partial replacement cycle for parts that are going to be submerged in or otherwise exposed to sea water which is notoriously corrosive, some of which will be at fairly high pressure (otherwise the turbines will be less efficient), that seems optimistic at best, even if nothing breaks before the scheduled replacement time, and you certainly can’t count on that.

I mean I think it’s intentional that there’s not data on that sort of thing that is collected or made available. There are methods one could use to get a rough estimate; someone elsewhere in the comments suggested taking the reported yearly profit for the company and dividing it by the number of workers. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we’ve got right now which is just a big ol ‘shrug’.

But there is likely someone doing the math, even if they’'re just ballparking it and not making it public, because that’s how they justify paying everyone’s salary. It would not surprise me at all to learn that giant corporations have a pretty accurate accounting of the value created by each employee.

If you read the article it includes this line:

The idea is relatively simple: hollow concrete spheres are installed at a depth of several hundred metres.

The pressure is needed to drive the turbine, cause just gently-flowing water isn’t going to cut it.

I wonder if that’s intentional…

That just sounds like yet another unequal way to divide power, so it’s still an oligarchy. Here’s a radical idea: why not give everyone who is affected by an entity equal control over it? Why does anyone need more control than everyone else? How could you possibly keep that from being abused to benefit the people in power more than everyone else? This is just capitalism with a little extra shell-game on the side to try to make the inequality seem more just despite being just as unequal.

Oh yes, please sign me all the way up for corporations pumping ads directly into my brain, that’s a great plan. :P

They describe these as giant concrete spheres, but there are (obviously) pumps and turbines involved too, and that those are aimed at a 20-year partial part-replacement lifespan. There’s no indication as to how much these pumps/turbines will cost but I’m gonna guess probably more than the cost of the concrete since it’s relatively cheap in comparison, and that’s before you consider that the major wearing components (which is to say, the expensive stuff) will have to be replaced twice within the intended lifespan. And that’s not accounting for things that break and need to be replaced, inside of a giant concrete sphere on the bottom of the ocean where maintenance will be absurdly expensive. Needless to say I’m pretty skeptical of the economic viability of this project. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t appreciate that one oligarch is better at lying to us than another one, that kinda makes it worse in my mind. Instead of telling ourselves comforting stories about how generous these societal leeches are we should be telling ourselves stories about how much better everyone else’s lives could be if they didn’t exist.

There’s an estimate floating around that it would cost about $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US. Whether or not that’s an accurate estimate, there is an amount that could do it, and every day that billionaires wake up and choose not to do it they choose evil.

If your standard for ‘a good example’ is being a bit more creative with his tax-dodging PR stunts than other billionaires, that’s a pretty low bar. A better example to set would be to not exploit people to accumulate wealth in the first place. It takes a whole lot of people like you and me staying poor to make Bill Gates that rich.

but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.

Bill Gates has a net worth of ~$168 billion. Even if this isn’t just PR intended to launder his image, even if he does in fact give away 99% of that, it will still leave him with $1.68 billion dollars. Even if he ups that to 99.99% that’ll still leave him with $16.8 million, which is still rich by anyone’s measure. Bill Gates’ idea of ‘not dying rich’ is radically different than yours or mine; he was never not going to die rich.

Seems like that’s a good time to go ‘Oh, maybe we should change it to say 11 then’.

Unless there are 3 of them hiding behind that machine, that looks like 11 to me?

Nah, it’s more that the answer to ‘why is <some company> doing this?’ is virtually always ‘because money’. People forget that sometimes.

It’s weird to juggle anywhere, but you shouldn’t let that stop you cause everybody’s weird in some way or another and that’s fine. A park seems like as good a place as any.