[ExI] wellbeing with less wealth, was: RE: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

 

spike <spike66 at att.net> , 28/8/2014 10:11 PM:

 

>>… in the last couple years I get the unexplainable feeling that another wave of anticipation of new cool fun stuff is about to crash upon us…

 

 

>… the clouds have settled, making big data and deep learning possible. We still don't know what they will actually be good for, but there is enormous potential here. … Anders Sandberg

 





Let me give an example.  Recently one of the ExI posters made a comment about a future in which they couldn’t get a job but they could have a pretty decent life in their poverty anyway because of the astonishing amount of IP available free.  Something to that effect.  Who wrote that please?  Do find it por favor, in your sent mail and repost the comment.  I want to review that and share some thoughts it has stirred up in me.

 

Here’s what happened.  My car air conditioner hasn’t been working for a couple years now.  Rather it does work after I drive around for 15 to 20 minutes.  Then it suddenly kicks on.  There was no ice on the evaporator, but I charged it anyway, no change.  I checked the system pressure; both the high pressure side and the low pressure side were nominal.  I found the high and low pressure sensors and shorted the high, opened the low; no change.  Then I found a comment online when I googled on “car air conditioner, delayed start.”  Someone commented that a compressor relay can go bad.  So I looked in the relay box, found one marked AC, noticed there were three other relays with the same part number.  So I swapped a couple of them.  The AC immediately started working, COOL!  But now the car quit running after about 15 seconds, damn.  So I put that one back and swapped out a different one.  Air conditioner working, car running fine, COOL!  But now it wouldn’t go in gear, damn.  Mister Lincoln has shift by wire.  So I have one last chance, swapped out the last remaining one, AC works, car runs, goes into gear, COOL!  I didn’t know what I had disabled, but I reasoned that whatever that relay did, it takes some kind of low current signal, such as from a switch inside the passenger compartment, and uses it to run a high current device in the car, examples being the air conditioner compressor, the fuel pump, the transmission actuator, and something else.  It finally occurred to me that it is probably the horn.  Sure enough, the horn doesn’t work.  Or at least not right away.  So now if some yahoo pulls into my lane, I lay on the horn, of course nothing happens.  Now I need to hope that 15 to 20 minutes later I am not in the middle of a pack of Hells Angels.

 

The point of all that: back in the old days, we would need to take the Detroit to a repair shop, and she would charge 600 bucks, absolutely regardless of what was wrong.  They always charge 600 some bucks.  I don’t know how that became a price point.

 

Now most of the time, a prole can fix his own car by getting on Google and taking his best guess at what will take him to the right site.  This represents well-being.  It saves a lot of money.  Similarly, the medical info we have at our disposal now is astonishing.  Our access to information should count as wealth in a sense.

 

I ordered a used replacement relay for my horn, 11 bucks, free shipping.  The new one was 29.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140828/8ab95f3c/attachment.html>