Who gives a damn about what is good for business? Businesses are (very) important only up to a certain point, until their interests start to go against the interests of the people.
If you are too nice and polite, you show a weakness. Dealing with someone who has unlimited power in a limited area is difficult business; I usually act as a polite but a dangerous asshole.
Your view on singularity largely depends on your relationships with John Searle Chinese room argument; I accept it, and do not find Kurzweil views convincing.
I read the Chinese room argument, it seems really naive. It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", which is clearly not the case.
We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference?
> It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", which is clearly not the case.
You need to read Searle's works again; his point is actually the opposite - we are machines made out of biological neurons, which seem to have an externally unobservable property of being conscious; we do not know what it is caused by, but we can see today that it is possible to create a simulation of human behavior by means of logical gates. We have no idea if it will have mind or not.
> We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference?
That's an odd argument. And actually does not contradict Searle at all.
Consciousness does not have external signs; I have not a slightest idea what it means "act like you're conscious"; a paralyzed person is conscious after all. The only reason to believe that humans (aside of myself, obviously) are conscious is that all humans share structural similarity with me.
If you want affordable, build dense, urban cities; not NY style rows after rows of 2 story building, separated by roads, but USSR style large 4-6-9 story blocks, build from concrete (longevity, privacy) with no eventually moldy drywalls, closed for through traffic, with parking garages, public places, playgrounds etc. American university campuses can be good models for residential neighborhoods.
Buildings which are just residential (and, for that matter, ones which are just commercial) still tend to produce dead zones, with little to no street life; and it's street life (and walkability) that makes a city, at least if you ask me.
I'd say that the best kind of city -- or district/neighborhood, more accurately, since cities tend to be a patchwork -- is an area of multi-storey buildings with businesses on the ground floor and apartments above them. My understanding is that this is the usual pattern in the Old World; in the US, the North End and Allston-Brighton in Boston, Seattle's Chinatown, and of course Vancouver are among the examples. This isn't a common pattern in the US; I know that parts of NYC fit it (although I don't know that city particularly well), but I've heard that even Manhattan Island is all office buildings, and becomes a wasteland after dark.
I certainly agree, though, that 4-9 storeys is a pretty good height. Smaller than that and you don't get enough density to support interesting streetscapes; larger, and you get wind tunnels and the need for more parking. Of course, sometimes geography (San Francisco, Tehran, most of Japan) or politics (Singapore) force a denser population, and require a more built-up area...
That's not true; I suspect it depends on how many other receptors they hit. One reason Lexapro/escitalopram is liked for its laser precision, in the prescribing information it has the following aside, relevant to receptors it doesn't hit:
"Antagonism of muscarinic, histaminergic, and adrenergic receptors has been hypothesized to be associated with various anticholinergic, sedative, and cardiovascular side effects of other psychotropic drugs."
It doesn't hit those receptors, so no, hence its ending with "other psychotropic drugs", the latter explicitly excludes Lexapro from being in that class of drugs.
