The expectation that we should be able to observe an advanced civilization seems highly misplaced. The db loss of the Deep Space Network to the Voyager space craft at the edge of our solar system is over 300 dB. I do not understand why our failure to detect an advanced civilization translates to the assumption that they are not there. The reality is we may simply not ever know one way or the other.

In 2103 the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator was fully modeled before being built plasma reactor, so in effect the experiments in 2015 at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics were the first times plasma physics was more science than phenomenology. Again with the MUSE stellarator we finally have the ability to model over one hundred thousand small rare earth magnets. With coil based magnets, current could be varied after the fact to tune a stellarator, but with the MUSE, they have to get the design right from the beginning. The big news is that we can now do this. We have entered a new era of plasma physics because our compute capabilities have reached the point that we can actually design plasma reactors.

The bar for filing a small claims nuisance suit is quite low in most if not all states. If everyone would sue them for their data handling practices creating a nuisance situation. 380,000 small claims cases would have them begging for a class action lawsuit. Wording the lawsuit to state that the enjoyment of your home has been impaired because of their actions requiring you to spend time in response to their poor behavior monitoring and worrying about your credit would be important.

https://www.txdot.gov/about/ca...

TxDOT buys and sows about 30,000 pounds of wildflower seed each year

By 1934, department rules delayed all mowing, unless essential for safety, until spring and early summer wildflower seasons were over. This practice has stayed in place for more than 60 years and has expanded into today's full-scale vegetation management system.

To add to your excellent list of impedances: All of the largely useless inspections required during construction that can extend construction time itself months. My favorite was the addition of sheet rock inspections following the Chinese sheet rock formaldehyde debacle. By the time the rules were in place (and of course they cover much more than the quality of the raw material), suppliers were already making darn sure they were not receiving unusable sheet rock but now every builder in the U.S. and Canada has to pause in the middle of construction until an inspector deigns to sign off on the sheet rocking.

You are not thinking like an information operations person. Think fake, but effective October surprise news releases. Fake videos that create credible SWAT situations near a key polling place. All you have to do is dishearten people into not voting or make it harder for one subset of people to vote.

Under our current laws, it is the person holding the camera or the microphone that owns the content recorded. We have to change our copyright laws so that WE own our own likenesses. Then, based on their work with the RIAA, the FBI would consider a non-consenting photo or simulacrum "theft".

There is something seriously wrong with how this problem was tackled. The bot seems to have no cognizance of how cities are typically structured bureaucratically and does not recognize entities like "City Attorney Office" -- which in New York is called "New York City Law Department". ChatGPT however does seem to possess this understanding about New York City. It feels like they trained on just the city website contents without enough supporting documents about cities in general. Their fear of a porn hallucination made them overly curtail the training corpus. Or maybe it was the fear of the bill.

I have also been through this with a couple of companies that thought they were not making the money that they should be making and basically didn't know what to do or how to run the company in a better way. These companies all ultimately folded after trying to take the advice from the consultants who of course knew even less about the company than the executives.

So it is either
Option A: The executives hired McKinsey with a plan that will likely destroy the organization as we know it
Option B: The executives are incompetent and executing on the advice from McKinsey will destroy the organization as we know it

McKiney is the company that:
- Advised AT&T in the 1990s that cellphones would only have 900,000 subscribers by 2000, when the actual number was 108 million
- Recommended SwissAir's "hunter strategy" in the 1990s, which led to the airline's bankruptcy in 2001
- Advised the General Electric strategy that resulted in the company losing $1 billion prior to the 2007 financial crisis
- Approved the disastrous $350 billion merger between Time Warner and AOL, which is considered one of the greatest corporate disasters of all time
- Had a close relationship with Enron for 15 years

that's basic economics right? :/

Or if you are one of those anti-capitalist communists you might say this is evidence of collusion even if the people colluding never talked to each other. (Ignoring for the moment that they all happened to share their proprietary business information with a 3rd party that they paid to help them choose optimal rents).

We elected one of the most selfish and disrespectful persons in the country as President of the United States. Many of the issues in this article come down to what is fundamentally selfish and disrespectful behavior. What do we expect? Children to not follow the lead of the President of the United States?

Apple has serialized all parts so that they could accomplish parts pairing. So Apple can easily their database of parts-used available to be checked for stolen parts in order to continue to disincentivize theft. It really is up to Apple to use this data for good rather than evil.

This would be a nightmare for Facebook if everyone filed individual federal lawsuits over this under the CFAA. Facebook seems to have checked all the boxes on this:

Federal law regarding unauthorized use of a computing device primarily falls under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is a United States cybersecurity law. Under the CFAA, there are several requirements that must generally be met to sue someone for unauthorized use of a computing device:
1. Access without authorization: The defendant must have accessed a computer system or network without authorization or exceeded authorized access. This means they accessed a computer or network they weren't supposed to access or they exceeded the access they were granted.
2. Intent: The defendant must have acted intentionally or knowingly. This means they knowingly accessed the computer system without authorization or exceeded their authorized access.
3. Damage or loss: The unauthorized access must have caused damage or loss. This could be damage to the computer system itself, loss of data, financial loss, or other tangible harm.
4. Interstate or foreign communication: The CFAA applies to conduct involving interstate or foreign communication or commerce. This means the unauthorized access must have involved interstate or foreign communication or commerce, such as accessing a computer system connected to the internet.
5. Exceeding authorized access: Alternatively, if the defendant had authorized access to the computer system but exceeded that authorized access, they may still be liable under the CFAA. This can include situations where an employee misuses their access rights to a company's computer system.

Of course this came from my favorite lawyer, ChatGPT so cave lector.

Many people who think they still have a landline really have a cell adapter attached to their house. If their last service "repair" resulted in them having an electrical adapter plugged in with a wire going through the wall of their house ... then their land line only goes as far as the exterior of their house. AT&T has been making these sorts of "repairs" for over a decade now. I'm sure the other providers are doing it to.

Fetal cells, including stem cells migrate to the mother. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Women can gain better immunity, healing, even new cells for their brains. But they can loose if this results in an auto-immune disease -- women are 4X more likely than men to get many autoimmune diseases.