The scientific method is great, but too many scientists have stopped worrying about science so much, and more about getting published.

There's nowhere near enough people out there who actually check the results from the work that's being done. You don't get a big grant from checking a major paper and confirming that they did the math and science right - or finding out that they fudged the results a bit.

Peer review only works as long as the peers actually review.

We need a lot of people who will go over research with the same intent and focus as auditors go over tax accounting ledgers.

Retraction Watch is doing a lot of that, but they can only do so much.

They didn't lose 8.6% (maybe), but they did lose at least 5% over that time period.

San Francisco lost 7.5% between 2020 and 2022, for example. The Bay Area overall lost about 3.2% over just those years.

Yes, but if you don't require that the data be made available, then there's no way to check it.

So you'd get a massive hypertext file that would be impossible the check without the actual source files.

Thirty or forty huge corporations submit their multi-petabyte training set lists, and watch the Copyright Office shut down completely.

You do realize that your "balance" was $66,200, right?

Not actually balanced, no.

...except that article does NOT tell the actual truth.

Yes, SBF donated to Democrats and Republicans. ...but most of the GOP money was to "spoiler" and RINO candidates, or to a small number of high-ranking Republicans. SBF claims to have donated a lot of "dark" money to Republicans, but hasn't mentioned how much "dark" money went to the Democrats.

Now, one of his partners seems to have donated a lot of money to the GOP - but they were (again) mostly supporting the challengers to mainstream candidates.

Another partner donated to Democrats, exclusively.

Basically, somewhere between 75% and 90% of the proven FTX graft went to Democrats.

More than ever, and they're spending more time per day using it.

That sort of thing happens when you do away with censorship.

The airlines have basically been informed, repeatedly, that they shouldn't even try, because they'd be infringing on people's rights.

Don't try to be rational about it - there's too many people who have political effort in place.

...because it was supposed to be ice-free by 2015, from past predictions.

679 reports out of over 15 million?

I wonder how many 12+ year old laptop power adapters from other manufacturers have only a 0.004% "bad" failure rate?

Sounds like they should be giving out awards instead of recalls...

(I have two Toshiba laptops from those years - different power adapter codes, but pretty much zero issues since I bought them.)

A lot of the things mentioned in the article are "hard for non-specialist" issues, and a lot of that tech is already trickling down.

Sure, the megacorps will have an advantage in scale, but that leaves the smaller solutions to the family farmer - once the tech is available.

If you're concerned about it, start looking into making an AI brain package for cheaper tractors and other equipment. You don't need hyper-smart driving tech to guide a small drone down a hundred yard crop row.

It's all about the rules of Worldcon.

It moves around, based on the votes of the attendees.

China put enough votes together (by buying a lot of memberships) to get it in China. It all went downhill from there.

It would take a major change in the rules to make this impossible in the future. And yes, your two nasty examples are technically in the running (in theory).

Keep your main data at home, run everything from there, and keep a backup on a somewhat remote server in case the building catches fire.

"...let's change the names of well-known things and pretend we did."

Everyone associated with this sort of thing needs to be ostracized by the scientific community.

And yes, that includes the people who "redefined" Pluto.

...and the response will be "Let's all buy software from places that don't give a crap about California law!"