I'd say having some kind of goals is definitional in AGI, so in a broad sense of "alignment" that would include "paperclip optimisers", sure, it's bound to be possible. Natural GI exists, after all.

Speculatively, if you allow it to do controversial things some of the time, my guess is that there is a way to align it so that the average person will agree with most of the time. The trouble is just getting everyone to accept the existence of the edge case.

The versions of utilitarianism usually give acceptable answers, for example, but there's the infamous fact that they imply we might consider killing people for their organs. Similarly, deontology like "don't kill people" runs into problems in a world where retaliation is usually the only way to stop someone else violent. We're just asking a lot when we want a set of rules that gives perfect options in an imperfect world.

"They" here was you. You did the math. That was a bit ambiguous, sorry.

Journalistic misunderstanding is possible, I guess. There's no way it's just a wire to the high-voltage motor output - it doesn't trickle charge off the grid directly either - although omitting the charging system is arguably more of a wording choice.

Here's another one where they go into more detail, and even mention the possibility of perovskites independently: https://newatlas.com/automotive/mercedes-benz-solar-paint/

Unfortunately the press release itself doesn't seem to be accessible, after a quick search.

I don't think Mercedes-Benz would straight up lie, and there's no wiggle room in the way they're wording things, so this is kind of a big deal. That said, there's no comment on how long the coating lasts.

Well, "they did the math". If you read the article, they're saying 32km/day in Stuttgart and 47/day in LA, and then extrapolating to 55/day in Australia. This is from their practical trials.

The kicker to the kicker is that they are claiming >20% efficiency here. It's apparently a very revolutionary new paint. The main thing they didn't cover is how fast it degrades, which has been a huge problem with perovskite-based systems like I bet this is.

They borrow themselves as a way of dodging US taxes, which might be what you're thinking of.

Holding bonds is the obvious way all of these people would probably be doing the sin of riba. It's not necessarily public information, though. (And you can invest in bonds too; there's no secret money glitch, just a societal lottery that someone will inevitably win)

That's a good point. Charlie III is so hereditary it's his whole brand. It looks like he might not actually have a billion, though, just most of one.

I'm not sure if any other European Royal families might have managed to retain more.

So I guess you can tell when someone's European Portuguese in writing?

Which parts do you really like?

Yeah, it's a continuous scale, which is something people miss sometimes. When you talk to people with millions of dollars they have a tendency to say they're not that rich, and point to some guy they know with tens of millions. They're not wrong per se even if they're dangerously out of touch; that extra digit changes a lot.

The bullshit is just that that scale goes way, way too high, as well as way too low. Human ability is normally distributed, and human worth is often held to be inalienably equal. Wealth follows a completely different distribution, for reasons.

A good guess. I'm not sure how Evangelical he is, but he sounds like a fellow traveler having worked with Reagan and inflicted abuse on people from other faith groups.

I said a Christian author just because most people are over the Protestant vs. Catholic thing, and Chinese communists are a particular favourite bugbear of theirs.

PugJesus could probably go into more detail, but it was a very rare and extremely serious punishment - partly or mostly because they were the ones that had to beat their own buddies to death.

Barley and normal corporal punishment were more like the everyday fare. The past was a brutal place, but in a lot of ways normal life is normal life no matter when.

My bad. Uuuuh... Indianapolis infrastructure, according to a quick search. Speaking of cities that get bomb reviews...

Not necessary. You can "have your cake" and eat it with spoons of both Aluminum and Aluminium, too. It just has to reflect spoken sounds in some kind of reasonably-direct way.

Hmm. Do Brazilians still spell stuff the Portuguese way? Most of the European languages probably have some kind of prescribed national dialect, Arabic has classical Arabic, and Chinese has non-alphabetic characters, but I don't know about that one.

LA is aggressively overrated from everything I've heard. NYC prices, Kansas City Indianapolis infrastructure, Manilla tidyness. The weather is nice, I guess.

Orthographic reform now! Our movement is dozens strong!

I've seen enough French spelling to get it, though, and I don't really speak French. English spelling is still often hard as a native speaker.

You guys can have second place, our system is the most ass "bar none".

There's a history of it meaning some kind of magical personality replacement thing, though. IIRC it was a Cold War excuse for why US soldiers defected sometimes. Cults exist, but the techniques they use to pressure people are a lot more mundane and take time to really take root.

Edit: Yup. More info here.

Two options, if you're shilling for billionaires:

They're intrinsically 10,000x better than you and me and deserve to be 10,000x richer.

It's just theirs. It says so somewhere, no backsies.

Pure trickle-down had it's day too, but it's it's a joke again in modern times, for the most part. You may object that these are all weak arguments, but basically, you and what army?

Edit: "We need a remote chance of becoming a billionaire for anyone to go to work" is kind of a blend of trickle-down and argument number one, but I suppose I should mention it, just for the sake of completeness

Some of them literally have their money in Euros and European companies, which the US does not control. I'm not going to whine if you wanna revolution, that's understandable, but be factual on the way.

I'm not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.