In the case of both quantum computing and commercial fusion reactors we're making progress pretty rapidly. A major reason that fusion has been so slow compared to some predictions is that simply put, the amount of funding for it has been well below projections. See https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/5budos/fusion_is_always_50_years_away_for_a_reason/?onetap_auto=true&one_tap=true#lightbox this graph. But the fusion situation is getting better, and rapidly. The triple product, a useful way of measuring how close a fusion reactor is to being self-sustaining has shown major improvement the last few years and it continues to get better https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-in-fusion-energy-the-triple-products Better computer modeling of what is happening in reactors, as well as better superconductors have helped a lot. And there's another large-scale change with fusion reactors which that we're starting to see a lot more private investment. Now, some of that is clearly due to hype, but a lot of it looks promising, and also helps show that the tech is getting to the point where it has some decent chance. If fusion fails to be commercially viable the most likely way that will happen is that by the time it would be otherwise viable, it will be competing with just really efficient solar and wind which are showing drastic improvements in cost the last few years.

For quantum computers the situation is not as good. But there's still clear improvements the last few years in at least three major respects. First, there's been major improvements on quantum error corrections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction Due to the inherent noisiness of quantum computers due to stray particles and the like, quantum error correction is really important. But the early error correction algorithms were just not that good. One of the first discovered was Shor's code which required 9 extra qubits for each logical qubit. But that was replaced with the CSS code which was much more efficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_code, and subsequent codes are even more efficient or allow one to play with tradeoffs. Second, we're much better at keeping qubits entangled with many others or for long periods of time. See for example, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2382022-record-breaking-number-of-qubits-entangled-in-a-quantum-computer/ Third, and closely connected to 1 and 2, there are now real demonstrations of CSS and similar approaches on physical qubits. See e.g. discussion here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7651.

It does not seem like either of these techs is going to be practical for a few years yet. But there's clear progress in both and at a rapid rate.

Good to see that China is contributing to global knowledge. Sadly, it comes from its military, but still good.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

You wasted money on the Fire stick (granted, not much), since the TV can do everything it can, and more. Okay, it looks like it can maybe do a little bit too *much* more (Gmail access), but it sounds like that was an oversight that is being fixed.

Agreed. I was only addressing the question of whether it could be used in court, and how.

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.

Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

Inflation isn't a deterrent to savings, it just means you have to put your savings somewhere that it also does work, i.e. invested in something. Having a non-zero inflation rate encourages investment, which encourages economic growth. This is good. But it's not the main reason we need constant inflation.

The reason we need constant inflation is because deflation is extremely harmful; it causes debts to grow which can make people and businesses insolvent. The Fed has a 2% inflation target because low inflation rates are manageable and because 2% is high enough that a decrease still won't go negative.

In general, documents are considered hearsay and are inadmissible. There are exceptions to the hearsay rule that allow them to be introduced, for example public records that are made in the normal course of business, but police reports are explicitly and specifically excluded from those exceptions. It might be possible to introduce a police report as evidence if the officer who wrote it is present to testify to its authenticity and accuracy, and to be cross-examined about its contents, but if the officer is there it's easier to avoid the hearsay question entirely by just having the officer testify.

Note that this applies not just to written police reports but also to bodycam footage. You still need someone to testify that the footage is authentic and accurate, and available to be cross-examined about it. With bodycam footage I suppose that could be either the officer or a technician responsible for collecting and archiving the footage.

In the case of an AI-generated summary of the footage, if the officer checked and edited the output I think it would be exactly the same as the officer's self-written report. If the officer didn't check and edit the output, then it would be a mechanical transformation of the bodycam footage and you'd need someone to testify to the accuracy of that transformation, as well as the authenticity of the footage. I don't think anyone could honestly testify that the transformation is guaranteed to be correct and accurate. In any case, though, the defense could always just review the footage to point out any inaccuracies in the summary. Most likely the summary would be ignored completely and the bodycam footage would be used directly, after appropriate testimony about its authenticity.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

The lack of clear English isnâ(TM)t the frustrating thing with modern day customer "service". I have lived in non-English speaking locales and can roll with a language barrier. The problem is outsourced customer "service" ain't empowered to do a damn thing except read from a script and by the time I'm frustrated enough to make a call it's invariably for a problem too complicated to solve with a script. AI will not fix this problem. It will just leave you yelling at a disempowered computer rather than a disempowered human being. The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.